Art of the Deal co-author predicts Trump will resign by end of year

Tony Schwartz, co-author of Donald Trump's memoir The Art of the Deal, has tweeted that he believes Donald Trump will have resigned by autumn. Schwartz, who worked closely with Trump on the 1987-bestseller he claims to have ghostwritten said: "Trump's presidency is effectively over. Would be amazed if he survived till the end of the year. More likely resigns by fall if not sooner." Schwartz, who has been a voracious Trump critic since his the Republican announced his intention to run for office, spent a year and a half interviewing and shadowing him in the mid-1980s. He further tweeted that he believed that Trump would be able to negotiate a deal giving him immunity in the Russia investigation, in exchange for his resignation. He continued: "The circle is closing at blinding speed. Trump is going to resign and declare victory before Mueller and Congress leave him no choice." Schwartz argued that the anti-Trump resistance must be maintained, especially as he believes the resignation to be near. "Trump must be isolated. Resistance every day. The end is near but must keep pressure high," his twitter thread continued. "The end game is on: Trump goes down or we do. He will blow up the world to prove he matters. We must stand up in opposition every day." During the presidential campaign, Schwartz announced that he was advising Hillary Clinton free-of-charge as "penance" for aiding Trump’s success and boosting Trump's profile in The Art of the Deal. "This is my penance for having created a man who has become a monster, and I’ve spent 30 years feeling bad about it," he told CNN ahead of the second presidential debate. "Now I feel like I’ve got to show there’s nobody behind the curtain." Schwartz underlined that there was "nothing" that he found appealing in his former subject. "This is a man who I really believe lacks a conscience at the deepest level, so there really was nothing." Schwartz claims to have received an intimate look at Trump while working on The Art of the Deal, claiming to have spent hundreds of hours talking, listening and observing. Retrospectively, Schwartz says that he regrets the manner in which he portrayed the former reality TV star, likening it to fiction and having "put lipstick on a pig". He has said that The Sociopath would have made a more apt title. In Autumn 2016, he donated the $55,000 in royalties that he received off of the book in the preceding six months to the National Immigration Law Centre, an NGO that lobbies for policies that would enable undocumented migrants to remain in the US legally. Trump has disputed Schwartz's claims that he entirely ghostwrote the book, but Schwartz said that he has proof from the publisher Random Hose that he wrote the entire book. Schwartz, claims that Trump only did some minor editing of the text.  A version of this story was first published in The Independent