I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

Thus opens Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. Of course, Tony Schwartz actually wrote it, and he told the New Yorker recently Trump himself wouldn’t be able to write that prose.

Trump’s literary merits, however, do not negate this book’s ideological significance to the real-estate mogul’s self-image. Schwartz may have been at the typewriter, but Trump inspired his words. Schwartz created a Frankenstein monster, but his account simply expressed what Trump could not: the self-consciousness of American capitalism’s most revolting features.