“Hey, if you hit the ball right, it goes. What can I tell you.”
—Lenny Dykstra, author and New York Mets outfielder

Six years ago my husband added action to an idea and started his own business. Today his company has 130 employees and $13 million in sales. At 13 million, we are not exactly swimming with the big fish of American business. Nevertheless, the past six years have been, to drastically understate it, an education. Ours has been a deep immersion into a small pond—one just large enough to include its share of venture capitalists, tax lawyers, trademark attorneys, bankers, accountants, and corporate big shots.

We have also encountered two business species I never before knew existed, what I have come to call the sniffers and the dealheads. Sniffers are people who loudly and confidently predict a new venture’s quick collapse, and then, when proved wrong, come poking around—sniffing—for a cut, an angle, or a job. Dealheads are sniffers on a big scale, more highly evolved and therefore harder to ignore. Dealheads do not have professions, careers, or even real jobs. They don’t sell a product or provide a service. Dealheads just deal, substituting “connections” for creativity, and “street-smarts” for expertise. They are habitual name-droppers, total suckers for the trappings of “class,” and forever hopeful of a big deal with Jack Nicklaus, having once met “Jack” on an elevator. While they often ignore ethical considerations, dealheads do not operate illegally; and there is something very American in their outlook: do it fast, hit it big, find the shortcut.

Legal questions and national character aside, I have come to loathe dealheads, because their shortcut to doing it fast and hitting it big runs, by necessity and instinct, straight through someone else’s accomplishment. The essence of every dealhead’s deal is always this: “I will take the fruit of your efforts, risk it on a deal, make a fixed cut for myself upfront (hey, I’m the dealer) and more on the backend if the deal succeeds. As for you, you will either make an unspecified return or lose your shirt. And on the off chance that you don’t like that deal, I am prepared to offer you my services as an independent consultant for a ridiculously large fee.”

The main thing to know about dealheads is that they should never, under any circumstances, be encouraged. Which is why the publication of real estate developer Donald Trump’s business autobiography. Trump: The Art of the Deal, is such a depressing event. While not a pure dealhead himself (there are occasions when he appears to operate with his own cash). Trump nonetheless has produced the ultimate dealhead handbook, and every crummy little dealhead in the country is going to be invigorated, motivated, inspired by it. The results will not be pretty.

In the past, dealheads (and certain varieties of salesmen and managers) sought their professional inspiration in the distilled philosophies of sports figures, usually football coaches, notably Vince Lombardi. But that began to change with the cultural emergence of the corporate leader as folk hero—an image which peaked, seemingly, with the publication of Lee Iacocca’s blustering autobiography. Vince Lombardi could finally rest in peace; dealheads had found one of their own to emulate. On office walls around the country, framed copies of “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing” were replaced with framed Iacoccaisms (my personal favorite being “In order to hit the duck, you have to move your gun”).

Now here comes Donald Trump with a whole new batch of slogans, easily memorized and suitable for framing. There are the Basic Attitude slogans: “You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.” There are the General Perspective slogans: “I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present.” Looking for something succinct and punchy? (Have a smaller frame?) “Leverage: don’t make deals without it.”

Still, the sports connection lingers, for Trump: The Art of the Deal reads like the as-told-to life story of an outfielder for the New York Mets. That is, it is not a book. It is a muscle-bound monologue that has been wrestled by a “collaborator” into a heap of paragraphs, most of which begin with “I,” and all of which are assumed to be fascinating by virtue of the subject’s celebrity. The volume displays that distinctly inert prose found in all “talked” books. You see, the words just aren’t there. Donald Trump is without skill at associating ideas and feelings with words, or words with meanings. Based on his book, Donald Trump is a less-than-articulate man.

That the last thing less-than-articulate people should be doing is putting out books is of no concern to Donald Trump. This is Donald Trump talking, the Donald Trump, “America’s most glamorous young tycoon.” For publishing purposes, he is the entrepreneurial equivalent of a well-hyped major leaguer coming off a championship year. That being the standard, it is enough that we are privy in The Art of the Deal to a full week, hour-by-hour, of Trump’s business diary (he declines invitations, he drafts a letter, he chooses Christmas decorations, he drinks some juice; he calls Ivan Boesky, he calls Calvin Klein, he calls Judith Krantz, he calls his sister). It is enough that we can learn Trump’s thoughts on the “genius” of Sylvester Stallone (“a man who is just forty-one years old, and [has] already created two of the all-time-great characters. Rocky and Rambo”), his color preferences (“I happen to like earth tones. They are richer and more elegant than primary colors”), and his plans for his New York apartment (“What I’m doing is about as close as you’re going to get, in the twentieth century, to the quality of Versailles”).

The effect of this lumpish conceit varies. Often it is simply comical. Here is Trump, a man who believes in getting things “done right,” relating the personal qualities of those closest to him:

I have a father who has always been a rock. . . .

 

. . . I’m as much of a rock as my father.

My mother is as much of a rock as my father.

[My wife] also happens to be a rock, just like my mother and father.

A Mets outfielder couldn’t have said it any better. Donald Trump is characterizing his family as a bunch of rocks. Well, as Trump himself says, “I’m a very practical guy”—so practical that he can make do with one description for four loved ones.

Trump is also a busy guy. He’s busy thinking big, really big, monumentally big. As big as you can get. Huge. His special gift is to be at once “practical” and grandiose: “To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.” But what exactly is “big”? What does it mean? Trump is ready with an answer: Big is “a whole different order of magnitude.”

“Think Big” is the first of Donald Trump’s 11 “Elements of the Deal,” the main insight onto which the other 10 are pasted, like little cutouts from every superficial business book ever written. There is Trump’s advice to “deal from strength,” and his opinion that those who question the man of boldness and imagination are “life’s losers,” victims of “jealousy and envy.” There is his “key” to selfpromotion, which is “bravado . . . truthful hyperbole . . . an innocent form of exaggeration,” always effective with people who “may not always think big themselves, but . . . get very excited by those who do.” There is his revelation that “I keep a lot of balls in the air” (big balls, presumably). Best of all, there is Trump’s theory of “controlled neurosis.”

Those fortunate enough to possess controlled neurosis—which is the manifestation of “total focus,” which is the secret to thinking big—are “obsessive, they’re driven, they’re singleminded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal. . . . Where other people are paralyzed by neurosis, [successful entrepreneurs] are actually helped by it.” By “helped,” Trump does not mean that these men find “a happier life, or a better life.” He just means that controlled neurosis is “great when it comes to getting what you want.” But what if what you want is “a happier life, or a better life?” Please. If that’s your question, you’ve obviously lost “total focus.”

Donald Trump’s 11 “Elements of the Deal,” the soul of his entrepreneurial philosophy, cover 10 whole pages of his book. Power-packed as those pages are, they pale alongside Trump’s real contribution to American business culture: his book’s title and the thinking behind that title. The Art of the Deal is a brilliant title, the perfect culmination of a decade of business mythmaking. The stories about “fearless innovators” and “marketing wizards” long ago gave way to profiles of business “geniuses.” Finally everybody and his brother was a genius (including Sylvester Stallone), and it was time for a new word, a new concept.

Donald Trump has it: the deal as “art.” “Deals are my art form,” says Trump. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” It follows that if Donald Trump considers dealing an art, then Donald Trump, dealer par excellence, must consider himself an artist. It further follows that America’s dealheads, being magnets for “truthful hyperbole,” will start defining themselves as artists, too. Making art and getting kicks. I told you it wouldn’t be pretty.

The dealheads are being had, of course, which is what they get for moving beyond the simplistic metaphors of football. For while Donald Trump is happy to present himself as a role model for would-be big thinkers, he does not for a moment expect real competition from them—or from anyone else. The first message of Donald Trump’s book is that Donald Trump is incomparable. The second message is that if Trump is not at all like the rest of us he is very democratic about it: he fully supports our right to want to be like him. He is a staggeringly unique individual who is also a regular guy, a one-of-a-kind business colossus who proves his humanity by inviting anyone—everyone—to be impressed by him.

It is a dual message of egomania and condescension that could be taken seriously only by compulsive role players with time on their hands. It is a message for dealheads—who are reading it at this very moment and quivering with artistic resolve: to become more rock-like, to develop a controlled neurosis, to avoid the use of primary colors. Put them all together, they spell “a whole different order of magnitude.”

[Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, New York: Random House; $19.95]