ASK Washington grandees to explain President Donald Trump’s rise, and they often recommend reading “The Art of the Deal”. One piece of advice from that I-got-rich-quick book, published in 1987, is cited more than any other: Mr Trump’s boast that he built a property empire on “truthful hyperbole”, playing on the public’s desire “to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular”. It is a striking passage to choose, but also a misleading one—implying that Trumpian success, in essence, rests on a talent for bamboozling rubes.
Actually, at the heart of “The Art of the Deal” lies a more subtle point about human nature: that some of the most profitable bargains are struck not with passive dupes, but with partners who are complicit in their own manipulation. A revealing episode describes Mr Trump tricking investors into thinking that a casino in Atlantic City is almost half-built by cramming the site with bulldozers under orders to look busy. Despite an awkward moment when an investor asks why one builder is refilling a hole that he has just dug, the gambit works. The investors had already been burned once...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2nrRrlF
EmoticonEmoticon