Tony Schwartz, who co-authored Donald Trump's best-selling 1987 book
"The Art of the Deal," says he has been served with a cease and desist order and told to return all his royalty payments after saying
he regretted being partly responsible for Trump's rise to the GOP presidential nomination.
"I got almost immediately that cease and desist letter delivered to me by FedEx," Schwartz told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Wednesday. "It is nuts. Completely indicative of who he is."
Schwartz said Trump has no legal claims against him, so he suspects he told his head of legal affairs to go after him and do whatever he had to do.
"So for example, this notion that I didn't write the book is so preposterous," he said. "I am not certain that Donald Trump read every word, but I'm sure certain that I wrote every word. And he made a few red marks on the manuscript and sent it back to me and the rest was history."
Schwartz said he was disappointed in Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Cruz's analysis of Trump's character is "remarkably accurate, and fiercely negative," Schwartz said. "And yet he will stand up there tonight and he will pull his punches. I felt somebody, somebody who had a clear exposure to Trump had to stand up. Unfortunately, that had to be me."
Schwartz says he has no personal animus toward Trump, even now.
"He's tough to have a personal animus toward because there's no there there," he said. "There's no heart. There's no soul. There's just a man trying to transactionally do what he thinks will aggrandize him."