What Donald Trump’s Books Say About Winning
Donald Trump appeared in many guises—billionaire real-estate tycoon, golf-course mogul, beauty-pageant impresario, reality-television star—before his blindsiding rise to the presidency of the United States last year. One of his least recognized roles is also one of the most revealing: success writer. Thirty years ago, in 1987, Trump’s The Art of the Deal leapt onto the bestseller list as a rollicking account of his business triumphs that, according to a glowing New York Times review, “makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again.” A string of advice tracts followed over the next two decades, among them 2008’s Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life and 2004’s Trump: How to Get Rich.
These books present the Trump formula for upward mobility, what he describes in Think Big as “a recipe for success that the top 2 percent live by and that you too can follow to be successful.” Although ghostwritten, they also epitomize Trump’s sentiments and sensibility. In language alternately disarming and appalling, they explain his view of the world, and the values that drive him.
Trump’s books fall into one of the oldest, most influential genres in American popular culture: the success tract, or literature on how to get ahead in life. In the early republic, Benjamin Franklin advocated “virtue” as the pathway for aspiring individuals unshackled from aristocratic tradition. In the 1800s, Horatio Alger offered hard work and “character” as habits that would produce prosperity in a competitive market
