Let us begin with the book.
In 1987, Donald Trump published Trump: The Art of the Deal, credited to “Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz,” a phrasing that does a great deal of quiet work. Schwartz, a professional journalist, wrote the book. Trump did not write it, could not sit still long enough to be interviewed for it in any conventional sense, and was instead shadowed by Schwartz for eighteen months, including having his phone calls monitored, so that Schwartz could reconstruct something resembling a first-person voice from secondhand observation. Schwartz has said publicly and repeatedly that he seriously doubts Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life, that he saw no books anywhere in Trump’s office or apartment during a year and a half of close proximity, and that Trump’s attention span made even basic interviews impossible past the ten-minute mark. In 2018, after Trump tweeted about his own pride in “having written many best selling books,” Schwartz called the claim “one more deceit and delusion” and said, flatly, that Trump is “incapable of reading a book, much less writing one.” The book Trump calls one of his proudest achievements, second only to the Bible, a book he also has not read, was written by somebody else, about a man who could not be bothered to participate in its creation.
This is where the intelligence question begins, and it does not improve from here.
