Tony Schwartz, the man who co-wrote Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal, has seen a steady increase in royalties as the campaign hurtles its way towards the finish line. In an attempt to right a wrong, he’s donating all of that money to charity.
The Washington Post reports that Schwartz has made about $55,000 in royalties as sales of the book he co-wrote with moldering pumpkin spice Frappucino Donald Trump increased over the past six months. And, now that Trump has peeled back his human mask to reveal that of a spluttering demon, Schwartz feels less than stellar about making money off the book, and ostensibly Trump’s image. In an interview with the Post, Schwartz said that the money he earned “suddenly became, for me, blood money.”
Instead of keeping the money, he’s donated it to the National Immigration Law Center, an organization that helps low-income immigrants and advocates for change that would allow more undocumented immigrants to stay in the country - -the diametric opposite of what Trump would do if he were president.
Schwartz was the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile earlier this year that catalogued neatly his role in the success of The Art of the Deal and his feelings of shame and regret as he watched Trump self-inflate into a pompous windbag full of dangerous ideas. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he said in the piece. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”
According to the Post, Trump also promised that he would donate the proceeds of the book to charity. For a while, Trump funneled money into the Trump Foundation, which purportedly donated money to charity. But, Trump’s newly-released tax records show that no money has gone to charity or anywhere else, for that matter, since 2008. Another promise by a man incapable of keeping them, broken!