Trump biographer rips 'trust fund baby' president for ignoring financial pain of furloughed federal workers

President Donald Trump's sheltered life as a "trust fund baby" is one of the reasons the self-proclaimed deal maker has been unable to remedy his government shutdown, a biographer explained on MSNBC on Saturday.

Tim O'Brien, the author of the 2005 book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, joined MSNBC's "Up" with David Gura.

Gura asked O'Brien what Trump had miscalculated.

"Well, I think it's the same thing he miscalculated when he was in the private sector," O'Brien replied. "He lacks actually all of the strengths to be a good deal maker."

"He's not intellectually sophisticated, he is not patient, he doesn't see what the other side needs and he was routinely taken to the cleaners on his most significant deals by people across the table to him who are better informed, more patient, and really put him in a corner," he continued.

Still, Trump hyped himself as a master deal maker.

"This idea when he campaigned that he was an epic deal maker who was going to bring business know-how to Washington was a complete farce," O'Brien argued. "Everyone in the New York real estate community knows he's something of a cartoon figure, he was never regarded as a major real estate developer."

"He wasn't Steve Jobs, he wasn't Henry Ford, he was P.T. Barnum," he added.

"He was the guy who had all the bankruptcies," NPR's Maria Hinojosa interjected. "How many bankruptcies were there?"

"He had six corporate bankruptcies and he nearly went personally bankrupt in the early 1990s," O'Brien answered. "But for a loan from his father, he would've gone personally bankrupt."

The biographer explained how Trump's background is affecting the government shutdown, which is now the longest on record.

"The irony, when he's talking about the federal workers, is he's a trust fund baby," O'Brien reminded.

"He was born with a silver foot in his mouth and has absolutely no empathy or understanding for what average people go through, confronting things like not able to buy groceries, pay a mortgage or the utilities bill," he concluded. "They completely escape his purview."

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