WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) -- The ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, U.S. President Donald Trump's best-selling memoir, predicted that the embattled president would resign by the year's end.
An outspoken critic of Trump's political career, Tony Schwartz told CNN news anchor and host Anderson Cooper in a televison appearance on Thursday that the "snowball" of Trump's criticism engulfing presidency "is beginning to gather momentum as it comes down the mountain."
Schwartz added that what was going on with Trump at the moment reminded him of the last days of former president Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974 after his administration's attempt to cover up its involvement in the eavsdroping of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, triggered a constitutional crisis and led to what has been known as the Watergate scandal.
"He's put himself in an isolated, no-win position. The level of his distructiveness is staggering," Schwartz said, as reflected in the president's response to the deadly racist riots in Virginia as well as his "back-and-forth" remarks on the Korean Peninsula.
Schwartz, who CNN said had spent 18 months working in collaboration with Trump on the latter's 1987 memoir, predicted earlier on Thursday via Twitter that the president "is going to resign and declare victory before Mueller and congress leave him no choice," adding that his resignation will likely happen by fall, "if not sooner."
Robert Mueller, an American lawyer and former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was appointed in May by the U.S. Department of Justice as special counsel overseeing an ongoing investigation into alleged collusion between Trump's presidential campaign team and Russia in the meddling of the 2016 U.S. election. Trump has repeatedly denounced both the collusion and the probe.
"Sitting in the background of this, Anderson, is of course Mueller's continuing investigation into Russia," Schwartz said on air on CNN.
The writer said Trump's frequent lies as president or when he ran for office are nothing new, but rather "This is a man who's been deceitful and manipulative for 50 years plus."
Schwartz told the New Yorker magazine last year that he felt "a deep sense of remorse" for "presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is" in The Art of the Deal.
Cooper has also criticized Trump several times. The president often bluntly calls out CNN for its "fake news."
