Trump ‘brings his worst fears to life’ with his ‘death wish’: Art of the Deal co-author Tony Schwartz

The co-author of Donald Trump's bestselling 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal offered a fascinating psychological analysis of the president, whose mental state appears shaky amidst steady stream of incriminating evidence being revealed in the impeachment inquiry.

"President Donald Trump is feeling the pressure from the impeachment probe. calling Republicans who oppose him, 'human scum' and of course made waves by trying to say that this lawful investigation was a 'lynching' earlier this week," MSNBC anchor Ari Melber reported Thursday.

Melber asked author Tony Schwartz about the "existential pressure" Trump was facing.

"Well, I think he’s a different person, as we all are, under what he experiences and in some way rightly as a survival threat. No question that his presidency and therefore his whole sense of himself is at tremendous risk now," Schwartz replied.

"I think as most people do, but particularly those people who have a limited repertoire, when we are under stress what we tend to do is double down. What worked for us in the past becomes a liability, becomes even in his case self-destructive," he explained. "So aggression turns into insistence and demand and viciousness that ends up coming back on him."

"What I see is that he’s a person who has a death wish that’s always been there. A self-destructive impulse," Schwartz said. "The way he views the world is that nearly everyone now is out to get him. And what he does is he creates the evidence to reenforce the view. It’s like a vicious cycle. So he’s constantly making true what he in his paranoid way fears is true."

Trump's defense mechanism "nearly always produces exactly what it’s meant to defend against. So he’s bringing his worst fears to life by doing what he’s doing."

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