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‘ALWAYS GET EVEN’

The Book By Donald Trump That Everyone Forgets But Shouldn’t

It helps to explain his recent Oval Office blowup with Ukraine’s president— and a lot more

Janice Harayda
Lit Life
Published in
4 min readMar 2, 2025

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Cartoon of Donald Trump floating upside down in a chaotic Oval Office
Cartoon of the Oval Office / Wikimedia Commons

You could see Donald Trump’s 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life as deservedly forgotten, but one chapter still resonates. In it, Trump retroactively sums up in a word his motive for much of the chaos he’s caused, including when Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the White House on Feb. 28.

That word is “revenge.” Trump writes:

“My motto is always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

In a chapter called “Revenge,” Trump elaborates, explaining his aims more clearly than in any book by or about him that I’ve read, including his better known Trump: The Art of the Deal.

Think Big and Kick Ass has no less blather than the others (“women love me”), though you might be surprised to learn that 15 years ago, Trump saw Hillary Clinton as “a fantastic person.”

If you think we book critics don’t earn our meager pay, try impaling yourself on 384 pages of lines like: “I am not a conceited person and I do not like to have conceited people around me.” No, HarperCollins, you did not make any…

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Lit Life
Lit Life

Published in Lit Life

Book news, reviews and more from an award-winning critic

Janice Harayda
Janice Harayda

Written by Janice Harayda

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.

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