“The Art of the Deal,”

Editing Donald Trump

What I saw as the editor of “The Art of the Deal,” the book that made the future President millions of dollars and turned him into a national figure.

By Peter Osnos

November 3, 2019

Donald Trump in 1987, at a book party in Trump Tower for the release of “The Art of the Deal.”

In the fall of 1984, a few months after arriving at Random House as a senior editor, I was at lunch with the publishing house’s proprietor, S. I. (Si) Newhouse (whose family owns Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker), and its C.E.O., Robert Bernstein, who had hired me away from the Washington Post. We were in the Bahamas, at a sales conference. Newhouse was ordinarily a quiet, phlegmatic man, I had been told, but on one subject he was very animated: Donald Trump. By then, Trump, who had recently completed the construction of a shimmering tower on Fifth Avenue, had been around for a decade. A profile in the Times, in 1976, had called him New York’s “No. 1” real-estate promoter. “He is tall, lean and blond,” the story noted, “and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford.” More recently, at the suggestion of Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer and fixer, who had been Newhouse’s close friend since their days together at the Horace Mann School, Trump had appeared on the cover of GQ, a Condé Nast magazine. The issue had sold especially well./.../