19 December—Back in 2016, during the Teflon con man’s first presidential campaign, Tony Schwartz, who in 1987 had co-authored “Trump: The Art of the Deal” with Donald Trump and ghostwritten whichever part Trump may have taken credit for, speculated that Trump had never read a single book in his adult life, not even one about him or “by” him; and that he pretends to have written more books than he pretends to have read—because reading even about oneself requires focus, which Trump lacks.

Schwartz mercilessly diagnosed Trump’s behavior as “pathologically impulsive and self-centered” and observed, “It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes.”

(In defense of Trump, some people can focus, others can’t. And drugs like Adderall and Ritalin may or may not cure the problem—assuming it is in fact a problem.)

It certainly wasn’t nice of Schwartz to say those things about the ignoramus-con man who paid him a quarter million up front and assigned him half the royalties of the best-selling book. (In fact, it would have been a disgraceful breach of ghostwriter protocol and ethics—were Trump not Trump and Schwartz not also his co-author.) In all events, true to form, Trump threatened to sue Schwartz for defamation and demanded his money back. As far as we know, though, Trump’s legal kleagles never followed through.

It’s fashionable and not inaccurate for literati and other snobs to mock Donald Trump with disdainful headlines like “If you’re reading this sentence, you’ve read more than the president has today” and “Trump’s lethal aversion to reading.”

The “lethal aversion” alludes to the common knowledge that Trump never bothered reading the President’s Daily Brief. One observer at the time commented, “After failing to read about the coronavirus [in over a dozen Daily Briefs], Trump failed to respond to it. It’s not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved.” The headline on that attack was “The president’s coronavirus response illustrates the perils of bibliophobia.” “Might”? And it was a stretch.

On the Crossfire TV program in 1987, right after claiming, “I really like Tom Wolfe’s last book,” Trump said that he hadn’t read “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which just happened to be Tom Wolfe’s latest book at the time. He also touted his own latest ghostwritten book: “I’m reading my own book again because I think it’s so fantastic.” But of course.

No one seriously accuses Donald Trump of being illiterate, to be sure. Or stupid, for that matter. Just . . . Rather, Trump’s aversion to reading is symptomatic of his lack of curiosity and predisposition to boredom. In his 1990 book “Surviving at the Top,” ghostwritten by Charles Leerhsen, Trump confessed that his attention span was short and “I get bored too easily.”

It’s said that narcissists are easily bored. It’s also said that Donald Trump is interested only in information—literature, reading, publicity, call it what you will—that affirms his exalted self-image. That’s why he makes a habit of referring to himself with Ex-Lax regularity only in the most positive and glowing way.

Trump also claims that he doesn’t have time to read. He likely has a point there, since he’s so busy lying, intimidating, and eating . . .