Since I found it so enlightening to read Hillary Clinton’s first book, It Takes a Village (1996, revised 2006), I decided to look at Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal (1987), with a fresh eye.

Jacket illustrations of both books have been updated, but inside The Art of the Deal, things don’t look so good.

Blurred type, uneven lines in “The Art of the Deal”

Remember in the days of Xerox when you’d lose the original and have to copy from a copy? And the next one would copy the last copy, and on and on until the words blurred together and illustrations faded out?

Apparently something like that has happened to the most recent (2015) edition of The Art of the Deal: It’s as if the plates weren’t replaced for so long that the type wore down, the photos faded and the lines wobbled.

In the book trade we used to call this a “begrudged reprint,” meaning the publisher (Ballantine) feels obligated to keep a former bestseller in print but doesn’t want to spend the money. So out comes something shoddy, like a pulp novel from the 1930s.

Faded photo from “The Art of the Deal” — for some reason the bottom picture is signed, “Nancy and Reagan Reagan”

In this case, I wondered if that great Mr. Sweetie Pie of paperback publishing, Ian Ballantine himself, rolled over in his grave and said, “Keep that idiot Donald Trump in print? Over my already dead body.” And so it was.

What He Didn’t Say

But back to what Donald Trump was saying 30 years before running for office. Of course The Art of the Deal was written with a professional author, Schwartz, so it’s a polished version of the same old braggadocio stuff Trump blows out today:

Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.

So: all he does every day is telephone powerful people and make deals. That’s how he’d be President of the United States today. Like a Mafia don, “sometimes I have to be the bad guy,” but usually the world presents him with prospects, and he doesn’t have to do any research; he just goes by his gut:

… A pair of beautiful gleaming white towers caught my eye. I made a couple of calls. It turned out they’d been built for about $120 million and a major New York bank had just foreclosed on the developers. The next thing I knew I was making a deal to buy the project for $40 million.

This kind of King of the Hill talk appealed to millions 30 years ago. People thought the book would give them tips about How to Win from a true real estate tycoon. Of course, Trump gave away nothing.

But today we recognize The Art of the Deal as the first indicator of the way Trump sold out to corporate media. Instead of conquering the world, he began performing for the world. Instead of reaping profits, he became a clown for money.

With each new book, he was more showman than author. On his reality television show, The Apprentice, he turned into caricature. He glowered for the camera; he growled “You’re fired!” He wanted to sound authentic, as long as it was scripted.

But the giant Trump, the powerful Trump who once made New York sit up and beg (or so it seemed) was gone. He never recovered from his bankruptcies. His real estate failures were colossal, and his books, gradually unreadable, stopped selling in the high numbers.

Suddenly Donald Trump was talking dirty in a desperate way on Howard Stern. The “brand” that at one time could sell anything — steaks, casinos, that stupid university — began to sound mean and sniveling.

Marcia Cross, best known for her role in “Desperate Housewives”

“Would you go out with Marcia Cross or would you turn gay, Howard?”

This week Rachel Maddow said there’s a rumor going around that Trump is writing a sequel called The Art of the Deal 2.0. This would explain why he’s still hawking the 1987 book, as she showed in a half-dozen video clips:

“President Obama, Secretary Kerry,” he says from the podium, “I highly think you should read this book quickly.”

““Oh, he’s got The Art of the Deal,” says Trump, spotting a man in the audience. “Hold that book up, please. One of the great books …”

“Who has read The Art of the Deal in this room?” he asks a baffled audience. “Everybody. I always say, [my book is] a deep, deep second to the bible.”

Trump pleading for a place in history would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, but as Maddow showed, it’s all part of a grand scheme to exploit the presidential election and make money.

As we saw this week when he had to reveal his campaign expenses, Trump has funneled donations of about $6 million to pay himself for use of the Trump jet, Trump hotels, Trump restaurants, his own homes, his son’s wineries and every possible item down to ice in drinks and merchandise like Make America Great Again baseball caps.

What an idiot (to quote my fantasy of Ian Ballantine): Does Donald Trump really think he can get away with this? “It’s a racket,” says Maddow, pointing to perennial candidates like Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain and Mike Huckaby. She asks: What do these people do for a job?

Well, they don’t hold office; they campaign for office. And they live off the donations that support each campaign. “What we’ve created is a weird system of incentives where people appear to run for office, but actually they run as a job where they can….get deals [as consultants] on Fox News.”

Trump would never do that — it’s too cheap, too weak, too pathetic. Plus they’re all losers. It’s just that he can’t help selling himself because that’s all he knows how to do. As a result his campaign looks like one big book tour.

And yes, if there’s an Art of the Deal 2.0, Trump may make a couple of million dollars from it, and add that amount to the other millions skimmed off donations to pay himself. Why not? Listing $1.3 million on record to finance his campaign (as opposed to Hillary Clinton’s $42 million), he’ll be given billions of dollars’ worth of free publicity by craven American media. So why should he care?

Well, the one thing The Art of the Deal tells us is that Trump cares only about being the conquering hero. He’s wants the glory of the conquest, and once that deal is made, he’s bored.

I think Trump is already tired at how much the campaign asks of him; he’s sensing the Oval Office will make him work 100 times harder. No wonder this Saturday he’s going to fly off to Scotland to open another golf course.

Of course, Scottish residents and elected officials hate him there for real estate developments he’s already promised and botched. But then, they’re not the American people.

I keep hearing this statement from women about the presidential election:

“Don’t ask me to vote with my genitals,” they say, meaning, Don’t tell me to vote for Hillary Clinton just because she’s a woman.

They’re right. If we voted for women only because they’re female, Carly Fiorina and Sarah Palin would still be around. These two are gone because they were ridiculously inexperienced, plus: you can’t cram femaleness down the throats of American voters, male or female.

Still, the fact is, the presidential election has been hijacked by genitalia.

From the moment Donald Trump said that Hillary Clinton got “schlonged” in a primary election, to his delight in describing the size of his penis, to his disgust at Megan Kelly’s menstrual period (“blood running out of her whatever”) and even at Hillary taking a bathroom break, genitals have been Trump’s way of avoiding serious subjects and generating headlines for himself.

But here is my hope:

After decades of hearing increasingly blunt slang about men’s private parts, I respectfully suggest the term “winkies” as a gentle way for women to refer to ours.

I’ve never had an erection or worried about genital size or understood what penis envy is all about. But I do know that just as the stars wink from above, wondrous reminders of life’s joys for women twinkle below.

The language of winkies is elegant and subtle. It connects our biological apparatus with life-inspiring things — love, babies, growth, purpose, harmony. It overrides Donald Trump’s references to a woman as a “bimbo,” a “pig,” a “fat ugly face” or “piece of ass.”

And it defuses Trump’s hate-mongering of other men as “rapists,” “losers,” “liars” and “killers.” When he threatened Ted Cruz with plans to “spill the beans on your wife,” he again cheapened the whole conversation with genital-based remarks. So the erosion of winkiedom continued.

Then came the recent Chris Mathews interview about abortion, Here more blatantly than before was Donald Trump stomping around our winkies to say that our choice about our reproductive organs and our belief in the moment of life’s conception were all for Himself and the government to decide.

So it’s no longer a question whether you even want to vote with your genitals. Donald Trump is saying his genitals overtake yours, if you let him.

Voting with my winkies, I won’t let him.

Back to Hillary

Most people acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is the most experienced candidate by far. That fact alone should be enough for a landslide victory.

But it isn’t enough, and the reason is well known: Hillary has a trust problem. I find it painful to watch, but she’s just not convincing at the microphone sometimes, not in the way Trump is. Perhaps that’s why Trump supporters forgive his many gaffes — yes, he’s belligerent, they say, but at least he’s honest. Maybe he’s fibbing, but he would never lie to us. Not in the way Hillary could.

The red (unfavorable) line ascends while the black (favorable) drops

The most eye-opening umbrella poll (combining data from 10 polls in one) charts her “unfavorable” rating from 33.4% in January 2009 to 54.7% by the end of January 2016. That’s a lot of lost trust.

Things might not get better for Hillary, as TV comic Jimmy Kimmel “man-splained” while she pretended to give a speech on his show: “You’re too shrill,” he said, followed immediately by: “You’re like a mouse up there.” “Is that what you’re going to wear?” “It would be nice if you smile” / “It’s too forced! Do you want to be president or a Lakers’ girl?” / “Oh my god with the sourpuss…”

It was funny and revealing. Hillary was a good egg about it. But the point landed beautifully:

Kimmiel: “You’re not doing it right. I can’t quite put my finger on it. You’re not ….”

Hillary: “A man?”

Kimmel: “That’s it! But listen, that was really cute the way you said it.”

The takeaway one couldn’t shake was that if Hillary Clinton were Donald Trump, she would wear her entitlement like a shroud. She could, as Trump has said about himself, “go out and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” And Jimmy would really approve.

A book reviewer’s perspective:

Maybe it’s Hillary’s advisors. There must be dozens of them making pronouncements about her style of speaking, dressing, talking, debating and, unfortunately, writing.

This last — her writing style — is my purview. I’m a book reviewer who for 20 years has been decrying and pounding the table and worrying about the narrative voice that Hillary Clinton uses in her books.

She’s written three memoirs to date and I’m sorry to say they’re all overwritten and full of palaver. Here’s an example from page 26 of Hard Choices, her 2014 book about being Secretary of State:

“My confidence was rooted in a lifetime of studying and experiencing the ups and downs of American history and a clear-eyes assessment of our comparative advantages relative to the rest of the world. Nations’ fortunes rise and fall, and there will always be people predicting catastrophe just around the corner. But it’s never smart to bet against the United States. Every time we’ve faced a challenge, whether war or depression or global competition, Americans have risen to meet it, with hard work and creativity.”

Oh, dear. You have to prop up your eyelids to slog through the blah-blah effect that takes up about a third of this 635-page book.

It sounds so superficial that I used to joke after reviewing Living History, her 2003 memoir: Why, the committee that wrote this book should be ashamed: Two or three words of actual significance sneaked through.

The “Rape Capital of the World”

At the same time, however, I want to say, READERS, KEEP THOSE EYES OPEN, because when Hillary Clinton decides to take action, the writing comes alive, and big, trustworthy events take place.

Hillary Clinton in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo

For example, on page 280, here is Hillary going to the “rape capital of the world” — the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (She was the first Secretary of State to visit an active war zone, according to the New York Times.) She went to Goma because soldiers on both sides of the conflict were raping women “as a way of dominating communities and gaining tactical advantage.”

This hideous idea, that rape has become tactic of war, systematically used to demoralize entire populations, was so brutal that women “could no longer bear children, work, or even walk,” she writes. And the practice wasn’t limited to Goma. Hillary would tell National Public Radio that rape as a weapon of war spread “from the Balkans to Myanmar, Sri Lanka to Guinea.”

Forget for a moment how many Secretaries of State risked their lives to enter a war zone. I want to ask how many of our highest officials before Hillary have mentioned the horror of soldiers raping every woman in sight as a war tactic?

Colin Powell’s report on “the atrocities in Darfur in 2004” included “exactly five sentences” on the subject in 2004. Madeleine Albright mentioned “organized rape” as a weapon of war in Kosovo in 1999. Condoleezza Rice spoke about it movingly on ABC News in 2008.

But it was Hillary who made international headlines in 2009; Hillary who declared it the responsibility of America to expose what is now recognized as an “epidemic of rape“; Hillary who introduced a mobile banking system for soldiers whose salaries were being stolen by corrupt officers; and Hillary who didn’t just meet with Congolese president Joseph Kabila but talked to rape survivors, aid workers, engineers, medical personnel and children in refugee camps that were getting larger by the day.

With Joseph Kabila

I go into this episode at length to acknowledge how quickly, and how deeply, Hillary Clinton learned to address complicated problems with long-term solutions during her term as Secretary of State.

In the Goma instance, for example, she could have waited for the usual State Department bureaucracy to grind out thousand-page reports nobody would read.

Instead she announced while still in the Congo that the United States would provide $17 million to “train doctors, supply rape victims with video cameras, send American military engineers to help build facilities and train Congolese police officers, especially female police officers, to crack down on rapists,” according to the New York Times.

And that kind of approach is just beginning. When it comes to women-related issues that too often get lost in obscurity across the world — issues like “domestic violence, forced prostitution, rape as a tactic or prize of war, genital mutilation, bride burning,” as Hillary’s “list of abuses” then included — Hillary Clinton knows how to work with her counterparts to find an answer.

Didn’t government used to be about getting things done? By comparison, the short-term, headline-making, genital-waving Donald Trump only wastes the world’s time.

The MacEnroe Syndrome

Maybe it’s the MacEnroe Syndrome — that tendency named after tennis player John MacEnroe to explode with righteous anger when officials make what he saw as the wrong call. MacEnroe played great tennis, of course, but perhaps his real performance was disguising that quivering lip, that scrunched-up face, so no one would see a little boy throwing a temper tantrum over which he had no control.

Trump’s version of this, whether attacking Rosie O’Donnell or China, is to distract people from how much anger he really carries around by acting tough and worldly:

“Get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades. I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve got to hit people hard and and it’s not so much for that person, it’s that other people watch.”

It comes on as a syndrome because blam! all of a sudden the weirdest outrage overwhelms the senses. By contrast, we may not like Hillary’s style, but she’s never apoplectic. Trump so believes in his sucker-punch persona that he wants his genitals to rule.

(Note: I quote the NYTimes and NPR above because [Donald, are you listening?] Hillary doesn’t brag. In Hard Choices we see that she did even more in the Congo and later at the United Nations about stopping rape as a war tactic (pages 279-282), and she makes clear these actions were only a start.)

So I don’t care if …

So I don’t care if Hillary sounds phony when her advisors tell her to raise her voice at the microphones, or look angry for the cameras, or develop that male swagger that makes Donald Trump such a compelling fascist to some.

It’s Hillary’s actions that count — hundreds of acts as complicated and terrifying to contemplate as standing up to the rape epidemic in Goma. And hundreds of others require the kind of calm, firm, transparent testimony she gave to the bullying and interrupting Republican members of Congress, who made the House Committee on Benghazi “thoroughly discredited as a partisan sham.”

That test of leadership included eleven hours of grueling testimony, from which she emerged as both trustworthy and presidential. Baited, patronized, attacked and dismissed, she never raised her voice, never responded angrily or tried to distract the proceedings by referring to genital size. She doesn’t have genital size from Trump’s point of view. She doesn’t care about genital size.

And then, voila, her most formidable critics could not contain their praise. If the hearing had been “designed to go after” Hillary so she’d wouldn’t dare run for president, it failed. As a result, her approval ratings soared.

That lasted about a week.

I’d also like to say a word about how great it is to fall in love with Bernie Sanders, as Susan Sarandon and a lot of women voters have. Bless him, he was a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq (Hillary voted for it); he’s passionate about income inequality and Wall Street reform; he’s taught us all to prioritize the issues (“your damn emails“), and I bet no one is more embarrassed and ashamed at Donald Trump bringing his genitals to the table than Bernie Sanders.

I worry that Bernie with so little foreign policy experience would, on his first day in the White House, be so completely overwhelmed at how close the world is to nuclear war that he’d want to call Hillary, who used to eat those Top Secret briefings for breakfast and digest them by noon, every day for four years as Secretary of State.

But most of all, I worry that if Bernie loses the nomination and urges his supporters to vote for Hillary, it won’t be enough.

It’s like the Equal Rights Amendment. Remember? A simple statement that said women are equal to men. Introduced to Congress in 1923 — a shoe-in, right? — pronounced dead by 1982. And that was a trust issue, too. A lot of women believed it but did not trust it.

The parallel seems to be that in the United States, when complexity is reduced to simplistic ideas, voters are supposed to sort things out. That’s going to be hard in November when we face opposites defined by cliche: Hillary wants to lead; Trump wants to rule. She is a feminist; he is the patriarchy. Hillary wants to be president; Trump wants to be king.

Not vote with your winkies?

Listen to them, girls — it’s the only shot we have.

Note: I’ve said all of this without mentioning Hillary’s first book, It Takes a Village, which is still the foundation of her candidacy. More about that, the recent fiasco about abortion, and a Hillary Clinton most of us don’t know in Part II.

Preparing for my talk on “The Publishing Revolution” this Saturday, the host group, Sufi Women Organization, asked if women played a particular role in publishing history.

Vat a question! You wouldn’t think that women in the fine old “Gentlemen’s Profession” ever wielded a lot of power, and I’ll talk about why they didn’t — until, that is, a fantastic turning point in the 1980s.

A quick glimpse: Before then, just about every general book review section was dominated by reviews of white male authors — Saul Bellow, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Joseph Heller and others.

After the 1980s, a Big Shift took place when those same front pages ran reviews of books by women — and very often women of color — such as Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Isabel Allende, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukerjee and more.

Want to guess why? (Hint: Think Bay Area.) Actually I’ve never understood it, but come for brunch on Saturday and let’s all figure it out in the Q&A!

A few seats are left and advance reservations are required (no tickets at the door) by the end of Wednesday, March 2. Here’s the info — see you then!

Patricia Holt

on

The Publishing Revolution

Saturday March 5, 2016

Brunch 9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

The Club at McInnis Park

350 Smith Ranch Road, San Rafael CA

For reservations call: 1-415-472-6959

Or register online at ias.org/swo