Throughout the Art of… books, one of Trump’s favorite expressions of approval is calling someone “a rock”—a person without vices and of extremely consistent habits, a person who doesn’t change. Trump’s father was a rock. His mother was a rock. Trump himself is a rock. Alas, his older brother, Fred Jr., was not a rock.
Interestingly, many of Trump’s critics agree that the man has not changed. This sociopathy, they argue, was learned early from his domineering father, Fred, who bullied Fred Jr.—with some help from Donald—into alcoholism and an early grave. In this telling, Trump may have also learned some new tricks from Roy Cohn, but he’s essentially always been this way: a “malignant narcissist,” according to the psychological school of Trump interpretation, which is the same thing as saying that he’s a born winner, except in derogatory terms. It also puts him outside of history; he’s a force of nature, a cancerous growth on the body politic.
But what those early books remind us is that, no matter their bullshit and self-flattery, Trump does have a history —that his view of his own rock-like constancy and almost everyone else’s instability was also forged by history. Something does change over the course of the Trump trilogy, at least on the level of how he is willing to present himself in public—and, of course, the world around him is also in a state of constant flux.
In The Art of the Deal, we find a triumphant Trump at the height of his success, having moved from the family business in Queens to the adamantine canyons of Manhattan. In The Art of Survival, we witness Trump’s tower beginning to shake a little, and in The Art of the Comeback, he has had a close call with ruination and, by his own account, is doing better than ever. By these latter two books, something else has changed: He’s more frankly an asshole. After years of trying to stay on top, after years of struggles that he himself might not admit to, here is Trump as we have come to know (and, for many people, love) him. By the time we get to The Art of the Comeback, we see him having come into his own. Long out of print and now selling for exorbitant prices on Amazon and AbeBooks, The Art of the Comeback is also Trump’s masterpiece (no doubt largely because of the talents of its ghostwriter and editor), a book that’s compulsively readable and funny. In it, Trump is a nasty sonofabitch, and he’s not afraid to say so.
