I HAD TO DO IT MY WAY
The chapter you just read was written personally by me, Donald Trump. I swear it, on the life of my youngest daughter. What you’re reading now, I am also personally writing. This entire book: me, all the words and sentences and larger sections, the paragraphs, the chapters, all mine, not “as told to” or “with” some pathetic low-life parasite ghostwriter.
This Trump book, unlike my many previous excellent Trump books, which were typed up by subcontractors who interviewed me, is being created 100 percent by me. It will be, if I can be completely honest, the best one. It already is.
There are many reasons I’m writing it myself. But the basic problem is trust. Who can we totally trust? Family. And by that I mean children—and maybe grandchildren, too, my oldest is ten, so I can’t say for sure—but not wives or adopted children because, sorry, they don’t contain your genes. Although I’ve heard you can inject people with your genes and make them related to you by blood, which is interesting. Genes, someone once told me, probably Dr. John Trump, my brilliant uncle at MIT, are like computer chips that give you a kind of Bluetooth connection mentally to your children, a kind of remote control over them. It’s how you own your children and grandchildren the way you own your homes, which is comforting, and why you love them.
But back to trust. I trusted the third-rate clown who “wrote” my phenomenally best-selling first autobiography, The Art of the Deal, and gave him many millions of dollars—but then thirty years later, because nobody had ever heard of him since, as soon as I ran for president he betrayed me. “He’s a Judas,” a lot of my Christian sup- porters said, which was true, and I like hitting back, but “Judas” seemed a little rough. Some of my supporters say that a lot about the people who hit me—even about people like John McCain, who’s Protestant, and Paul Ryan, who’s Catholic—and I always wonder if that makes my son-in-law Jared Kushner feel bad, or even Ivanka, who’s now technically one also. I’d asked Steve Bannon, my campaign CEO and first White House chief strategist, if he would arrange to have them turn down the “Judas” stuff a little. Not good.
Then I trusted a nice lady at The Trump Organization, former ballerina, used to be gorgeous, who helped write a few of my recent bestsellers—including Trump: How to Get Rich, Money Does Buy Happiness, The Amazing Magical Miraculous Mr. Trump, and Everyone But You Is a Loser. So I let her write my wife’s little speech for the Republican convention. By using Michelle Obama’s convention speech for that, she didn’t betray me on purpose—my top security guy, Keith, spent a few hours alone with her making sure, believe me—but she did give the dishonest hater disgusting fake media an opportunity to embarrass me and, sure, my wife, on the day of my nomination. Although as Ted Nugent said to me when that blew up, he goes onstage at every concert and plays songs by Chuck Berry and Sam & Dave and the Temptations and Jimi Hendrix and so on, and everybody thinks that’s totally okay.
Some earlier Trump books, all huge bestsellers even though “I” didn’t “write” them.
Since this will be my greatest and most important book yet, there was another problem: What “professional writer” could I trust to understand and truly love Trump? Sean Hannity volunteered to write it, and I believe Sean does love me with the kind of total loyalty I rarely see in high-net-worth individuals who aren’t related to me. But I’m sure that like almost all successful people, Sean hires ghostwriters to write his books. Plus, with his show to do every night, which is extremely important for our country, he wouldn’t be able to do what I needed—be around me all the time, in every meeting, seeing and hearing it all, taking notes. Then the lawyers told me that any outside writer would have to get the top, top, top security clearance, too, which would make the lying, fake media go crazy—although, about that, Bannon said “a feature, not a bug,” which is true and funny, but Ivanka convinced me it wasn’t worth the fight.
Everybody thought they’d convinced me to drop the idea of doing this book. Can’t be done. Too hard. Too many other things on my plate, all the making-America-great things. Even though they also all agreed I have been making America great in so many ways for years, quietly, sometimes anonymously.
“Wait until you’re out of office, Daddy,” Ivanka said, “when you can say everything you want to about Ryan and Merkel and the Clintons and everybody else, and you’ll get paid even more.”
“That’s Mr. President-elect Daddy to you,” I replied, with a little pinch, as usual, “but do the math, baby. After eight years, I’ll be almost eighty. I know you say ‘eighty is the new forty,’ but I don’t want to wait that long to bring out the true story.” And I probably won’t want to stay in office any longer than that, although as Jared said, Mike Bloomberg got the system in New York fixed so he could stay mayor for an extra four years. And a friend told us that a friend of his in Europe, the president of Belarus, which is an actual European country, did the same thing, so he’s been the elected president there for twenty-two years and counting. So anything’s possible. And Trump specializes in doing the impossible. And then I’d be the first U.S. president in like a century, since FDR, to go more than two terms. That would be very special.
If you tell Trump he can’t do something, that makes him do it. Like my MIT uncle Dr. John Trump, PhD, taught me, “Every action causes a much, much bigger reaction against it.” The other great thing about me is that if I have a problem with one of my businesses, I always step in and fix it myself. (For instance, that’s what Roy Cohn was referring to in the previous chapter, concerning the dishonest person causing the problem when I was building my casinos in Atlantic City.)
So for this book, I decided I really had to do it myself. I had to do it my way.
Incidentally, that’s my favorite song, “My Way.” I love my Native American friend Wayne Newton’s version, which he sings for me every time I see him, almost whispers it in my ear, so fantastic. (Which means I’ve had the opportunity to examine that very expensive face of his up close. Whoa.) I was going to print the lyrics to “My Way” right here until I found out how they screw you for that, even though you can read them for free on the Internet. Unbelievable! So why would I pay thousands of dollars to the composer, the very overrated Paul Anka, who wouldn’t even perform at our great inauguration?
Hold on, before I forget.
VOICE MEMO: Presidential to-do list
Write songs, words, not music—have them recorded by Nugent, Meat Loaf, the Jackie girl from the inauguration, Kanye et cetera.
Okay, I’m back. You see, I’m actually saying this book right into my phone. It’s amazing. I talk, I create it, it types, talking is writing nowadays, which is so great. And the beauty of this is that the computer in my phone doesn’t need a security clearance, and it won’t put in words I would never use or betray me or quit, like the ghostwriters. I own this phone.
My brilliant ten-year-old showed me how to push a button on the screen to make it tape my conversations whenever I want, even when it’s in my jacket, and then later turn those recordings into words, too. So you, the reader, will be right here with me, wherever I am as President Donald Trump—in the Oval Office, in the foreign countries I visit, inside the underground command rooms, flying on NASA’s secret presidential rocket to inspect our secret bases on the moon, which Alex Jones tells me definitely exist. I’ll be reporting my inside story “in real time,” as Jared calls it, which I like because that also means it’s the opposite of fake time. “You could do it in present tense,” he said, “which would make it more exciting to readers.” Right, I told him, exactly. Because I knew that “present tense” means words that express an action or state in the present moment and are used concerning that which is true at the time of writing or speaking. Examples include: “I am talking into my phone from my amazing apartment at the top of Trump Tower, and the people on the street down below look even smaller than ants, more like ticks or lice,” or “It is so fantastic being president-elect of the United States of America.”
Writing my president book by talking makes it possible for me to do it, but if I’m being honest, which I always am, the idea of doing the whole book all by myself was at first . . . made me . . . seemed like . . . oh, what is that word the phonies always use? That fake positive word when they don’t want to admit they feel scared or stupid—right, okay, dot-dot-dot: Writing a whole book by myself seemed like a serious challenge.
I had one of the girls bring me a few of the recent president memoirs, which are unbelievably long. And, I’m sure, if you read them, which probably nobody does in those cases, unbelievably boring. My very intelligent youngest son did the arithmetic—Bill Clinton’s book is like four hundred thousand words and even the one by George W. Bush is two hundred thousand. Give me a break! What are they trying to prove? And by the way, it shows those two guys have no business sense whatsoever, because publishers do not pay you a nickel more for writing more. They pay you per book, so get ready for the first sequel, probably in 2018, You Still Can’t Spell America Without Me!
But I’m not a “professional writer,” one of my family members warned me, although at first I thought she was saying “professional fighter.” Oh, I told her, I guess you’re the house expert on what makes somebody a professional or not, but I wasn’t a professional TV star until I decided to become one of the most successful of all time, was I? I wasn’t a professional politician until I decided to become the most successful of all time. But then Barron, who’s not just my youngest son but I also think quite frankly my smartest one, told me the secret truth: I’ve already written more than thirty thousand tweets, and each tweet is twenty-five words, which means like a million words in the last few years. So I’m actually a very, very successful writer with millions of readers and years of experience. Jared says he has a guy—one of the European guys who did such great Internet work for us during the campaign—who’ll make me an “app” that automatically eliminates most of the quotation marks I use to spice up the tweets and turns the exclamation points into periods. I told him okay, but I also want another app that turns any word I say into all capital letters if I want, just by my thinking it. Which I bet the Pentagon has.
We’re going to auction this book to all the publishers after I’m finished. Did you realize most of them are foreign-owned now? Which is very, very interesting. Very. Anyhow, my “floor,” as we say in business, is $60 million, because that’s what Barack and Michelle Obama are getting for their two books. And by the way, this book, my book, the Trump book, is now out before theirs, even though Obama was president before me. The First Lady has an approval rating even higher than mine, ridiculously high—this is her honeymoon period, good for her—but frankly I don’t think a publisher will pay all that much for a book by her. I’m not saying that just because of the funny English, or because she’s not angry like Michelle, with a million opinions about everything. The American people like Melania because she’s very beautiful and she’s with me, but also because she doesn’t say much, so why would they want to read a book by her? It’s a sad “Cash-22.” If you don’t know it, that’s a word Steve Bannon uses, meaning a real-life good news–bad news joke—like, say, a guy who could get literally any woman any time but can’t because he’s being watched every minute, like he’s in prison—that’s a Cash-22.
Millions of people are now buying this book—you did, right?—for the same reason people voted for me and the same reason that even the haters can’t stop reading about me and talking about me and thinking about me and actually dreaming about me. Because I’m not a phony, and I’m totally honest in a way nobody else in this position has ever been.
I promise everything here is 100 percent true, so true, all of it. People are already telling me it may be the truest book ever written. It is the unauthorized, uncensored inside story of me by me—thanks to technology, from my brain to my mouth to your eyes and ears and brain directly. It’s like you and I are making out and I’m just shooting information into you, shooting streams of thought and my true “me” into you. (Although if you’re a man, it’s like we’re merging and sharing power in a sci-fi movie scene, like Obi-Wan Kenobi talking directly to Luke Skywalker from heaven.) I’m going to tell you things they don’t want me to say as president, not in the speeches or the press conferences or even on Twitter—and I can do that here because I’m not writing as the president, okay, but as Donald Trump, just another American citizen who also happens to be president, so . . . freedom of expression, First Amendment, totally honest, no holds barred, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, all for you and us, the great American people.