The key ideas

The Art of the Deal

Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz, 1987

A rundown hotel by a train station, a tower on Fifth Avenue, a casino by the sea and a skating rink the city could not finish for almost seven years. Donald Trump tells how he made these deals and boils his experience down to eleven rules. You will learn how he thinks about risk, leverage and publicity, and why he starts every deal by thinking about the worst.

Who it is for

For anyone who negotiates, sells or is starting a business of their own. And for anyone curious about what big real estate deals look like from the inside.

Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.

A hundred calls a day and no briefcase

New York, the mid-1980s. A man gets to his office at nine in the morning and goes straight to the phone. He rarely makes fewer than fifty calls a day, and often it is more than a hundred. He carries no briefcase and does not pack his day with meetings. Too much structure, he says, gets in the way of imagination. This man builds skyscrapers in Manhattan and casinos in Atlantic City, and his name is Donald Trump.

He published this book in 1987 with the journalist Tony Schwartz. Schwartz sat beside him for months and listened to his business calls. The result is part diary, part handbook. It holds a week in Trump's life, eleven rules of the deal that he calls its elements, and the stories of the big deals where those rules did their work.

The central idea is there from the first page. Trump says he does not make deals for the money. A deal is to him what a painting is to an artist or a poem to a poet. It is an art form, and like any art it has its own technique.

Ahead are a rundown hotel by a train station, bulldozers for a board of directors, letters to a man who said no, and a skating rink the city could not finish for almost seven years. Every story is told the way the author himself tells it.

The hotel everyone wanted to get rid of

The mid-1970s. New York is barely scraping by, and the huge old Commodore hotel next to Grand Central station is losing money. It belongs to the bankrupt railroad company Penn Central, which wants it off its hands. Trump looks at the building and sees not a loss but a future new hotel.

He gets an option, the right to buy the building later on terms agreed in advance. Then he finds a partner, the Hyatt hotel chain. The key to the deal was a forty-year tax abatement he won from the city. That is how the Grand Hyatt rose where the Commodore had stood. It was Trump's first big deal in Manhattan.

This is the first element: think big. Trump explains why most people don't. Most people think small, he says, because they are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. The key to thinking big, as he sees it, is total focus, and he calls it almost a controlled neurosis.

For him, thinking big is not daydreaming but a way of doing business. He describes his style simply: aim very high, and then keep pushing.

Read in Livria

About the author

In the 1980s Donald Trump ran the Trump Organization and developed real estate in New York and Atlantic City; he later became President of the United States. Tony Schwartz, an American journalist, wrote this book with him.

All books by this author: Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz

Terms from the book

  • Leverage
  • Tiffany
  • option
  • Grand Central
  • Schwartz
  • Hyatt
  • Hill
  • Atlantic City: A resort city on the coast of New Jersey. Casinos have been legal there since the late 1970s.
  • Commodore: A big old hotel next to Grand Central station. Trump rebuilt it as the new Grand Hyatt hotel.
  • Penn Central: An American railroad company that went bankrupt in 1970. Its managers sold off the company's real estate, including the Commodore hotel.
  • Tax abatement: A decision by the authorities to lower a tax or waive it for a set period, usually to support a project the city wants.
  • License: Official permission from the authorities to run a particular business. To open a casino in New Jersey, you need a license from the state gaming commission.
  • Hilton: An American hotel company. It built a hotel and casino in Atlantic City, was refused a license for it and sold the building to Trump.
  • Greenberg: Alan Greenberg, in the 1980s the head of the investment bank Bear Stearns and Trump's banker.
  • Holiday Inn: An American hotel company that also owned casinos. In the book Trump buys up its shares and builds a casino with it in Atlantic City.
  • Controlling stake: A share of a company's stock large enough to give its owner the right to decide how the company is run.
  • Bonwit Teller: A New York department store on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Trump built Trump Tower on its site.
  • Genesco: The American company that owned the Bonwit Teller department store.
  • Jarman: Franklin Jarman, the head of Genesco, who refused to sell Trump the store's building.
  • Hanigan: Jack Hanigan, the executive who took over Genesco after Jarman and agreed to the deal with Trump.
  • Letter of intent: A preliminary document in which the parties state that they plan to make a deal, before the full contract is drawn up.
  • Atrium: A tall inner hall of a building, usually under a glass roof, open through several floors.
  • Bravado: Boldness and confidence put on for show.
  • Truthful hyperbole: A phrase from the book, not a scientific term. It is Trump's name for promotional exaggeration that, as he puts it, fools no one.
  • Wollman: Wollman Rink, a skating rink in New York's Central Park. Trump took on rebuilding it after years of failed work by the city.
  • Contractor: A company or person hired under contract to do construction work for a client.

All terms

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