Trump relives his past

As president, Donald Trump is reliving two of his life’s milestones, “co-authoring” the book The Art of the Deal and starring in his reality television show The Apprentice.

I put the word co-authoring in quotation marks because, like much about Donald Trump, it’s controversial. Trump produced the book with a professional writer, Tony Schwartz, who now says harsh things about the President.

Among other things, Schwartz says Trump “is incapable of reading a book, much less writing one.” Why Schwartz is so angry at the President is unclear. Trump must have treated him badly in some way.

What is known is that Schwartz feels he did all the heavy lifting on the book and was essentially a ghostwriter. He followed Trump around for the best part of the year and then wrote the book. Schwartz says Trump made very few revisions, other than to change or delete a few things said about his friends. It was published in 1987.

That’s no surprise. It’s what ghostwriters do. Each has his own way of doing things and some people whose lives are being recorded for posterity write lengthy drafts for the co-author to revise and upgrade to publication standards. Some don’t.

But Schwartz is in a class by himself. He resents Trump’s claims to being author of the book, though Schwartz’ name is on the cover along with the President’s. But any idiot can look at such a cover and know that one of the two names is the writer and the other is the one being written about.

And in Trump’s defense, I’m sure he spent a lot of time thinking about what he wanted to say and felt he was dictating its content to Schwartz. Schwartz gets huffy when Trump claims that he wrote it, but I think Trump can justifiably claim it as his own.

Schwartz also points out that Trump says things that are just not true. The news media, “fake news” as the President calls it, points out his looseness with the facts on a daily basis.

But that is part of the overall Trump persona. When he says something factually incorrect, you can always understand the argument he is trying to make. The word for what the president is using is hyperbole. The dictionary defines hyperbole as “a detail, especially one that is not true, added to a statement or story to make it more interesting or entertaining.”

It seems to me that is exactly what Trump is doing — and while it’s fair for the media to point out when he has wandered out of the factual realm, they claim his words are simply false. As in: liar, liar, pants on fire.

Trump notably employs his flamboyant management style when he deals with difficult countries like North Korea. Though he once threatened to blow the country, a generations-long adversary of the United States, into tiny bits, the President has established a rough but apparently workable relationship with North Korea.

Pyongyang hasn’t agreed to end its nuclear program, but expecting that at this stage of the game is ridiculous. The fact that the United States has any kind of relationship with North Korea is a notable achievement. His approach is to threaten Armageddon and then come right back with a statement like “Maybe we should get together and talk a little.”

Despite his flamboyant personal style, the President has made progress in many areas. Please understand that I am not a Trump admirer — I think he may be tarnishing our image in a way that could last for years — but I will admit he has made progress in many areas. Those include good decisions on keeping our troops in the Middle East, nurturing a strong economy, enacting tax and regulatory reform, and getting our NATO allies to kick in billions for our collective security, a major change from the days when the United States was expected to carry the bulk of the burden.

At the White House our President likes to relive his days on television. In his show “The Apprentice,” business executives competed in teams to develop top competitive strategies. Each week one of the competitors would be selected for elimination and Trump would bellow: “You’re fired.” That always seemed unnecessary roughness, but I must admit it kept people watching the show.

And these days members of his White House staff frequently hear the words “You’re fired.”

It’s his way.