| | | Trump and Me by Mark Singer (2016, Tim Duggan Books)
Nobody can say we weren’t warned. At the time this book came out, it could reasonably be viewed as a cheap cash grab. At just over 100 pages, some of it reprinted from articles written in the past, it seemed like an attempt by the author to capitalize on extensive access he’d been granted in the mid-1990s to write a profile piece on Trump for the New Yorker.
What Trump had not expected was that allowing a reporter to shadow him for hours every day would result in the reporter becoming very familiar with Trump… and disliking what he found.
Far from being impressed by Trump’s ability to con people and thus maintain the image of an influential businessman – something most people in the Trump inner circle appreciated and joined with, to enrich themselves – Singer was appalled at the lack of ethics, the shallowness, the casual cruelty and particularly the utter disdain for honesty that Trump exhibited.
This book, published months before the election, explained via a series of personal anecdotes and professional study exactly what Trump’s personality flaws were. At a time when many others were saying that Trump was a serial liar, he was providing evidence that Trump had been so for at least two decades. When others were observing that Trump was concerned only with his personal wealth, Singer was explaining the timing of his divorce from Marla Mapes, pointing to the clauses in her prenuptial agreement which would have provided her with tens of millions of dollars more had they remained married for a few more months.
It’s not a comprehensive volume and it teaches nothing new about Trump’s personality. It nonetheless deserves credit for being among the earliest of the alarms, and for providing examples and details from 1990s-Trump that foreshadowed events of the Presidency. |
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