The World's Worst Negotiator Is Back

Trump hasn't even taken office yet, and he's already showing how terrible he is at making deals.

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Though he will not take office for another month and a half, the president-elect has begun negotiations with a great many people — foreign leaders, members of Congress, and in all likelihood, various business interests who are privately seeking his favor. And he’s already demonstrating what Americans should have realized after his first term, but clearly didn’t:

Donald Trump is the world’s worst negotiator.

That this fact is not widely understood is a testament to Trump’s simple-minded genius, and the truth of his conviction that people — not all people, but a hell of a lot of them, and maybe a majority — can be fooled into believing almost anything. Whether Trump knows himself that he is a terrible negotiator is impossible to determine, but this much is certain: The next four years are going to be another parade of failed negotiations, fake “deals,” and missed opportunities.

Let’s not forget that when he was president the first time, Trump promised at various times that he’d negotiate deals to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions (after he trashed the agreement that was actually containing those ambitions), to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, to end the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, to get Mexico to pay for a border wall — and that’s just in foreign affairs. He failed on all of them. Yet the idea that Trump will unleash his peerless negotiating skills on all the world’s problems is still bandied about as though it were something other than a joke.

And now he’s at it again. Here’s what he sent out the other day on his social media platform:

So Hamas is going to be “hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America.” What exactly is he suggesting here? That he will drop a nuclear bomb on the gigantic pile of rubble to which Gaza has already been reduced? I doubt that makes the group’s leadership particularly afraid.

This is the first and most important part of any Trump negotiation: He begins with a bombastic threat, an attempt to show the other side that he’s in control and they’d better knuckle under. When the threat is utterly implausible, however, that has no effect at all. Trump doesn’t understand that, because he’s a terrible negotiator.

He did the same thing recently with Mexico and Canada, threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on all imports from the two countries. Given that we import almost $900 billion a year in goods from them, that would amount to imposing a $225 billion sales tax on Americans, which of course he’ll never do.

Nevertheless, Mexico and Canada took the threat somewhat seriously, at least to the extent that they had to make a show of responding so Trump would feel like a big important boy. Both President Claudia Sheinbaum and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to explain publicly what a bad idea a trade war would be, and Trudeau even went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. Trump is touting that visit as evidence of his dealmaking prowess, apparently unaware that foreign leaders now know that the easiest way to deal Trump is to treat him like a big shot so his insecurity is assuaged, regardless of whether you actually concede anything (“I spoke with Canada. Justin came flying right in because we talked about 25 percent tariffs”). But everyone knows how this will end: Mexico and Canada will make some pledges to do what they’re already doing on immigration and drug smuggling, and Trump will declare victory. Substantively, it’s meaningless.

Trump is even less able to negotiate with Congress

If anything, Trump is even less capable of negotiating domestic policy, since that requires managing the complex swirl of personalities, interests, and incentives that is the U.S. Congress. As you may recall, Trump signed only one significant piece of legislation in his first term, a gigantic tax cut for the wealthy and corporations. This required no negotiating at all: Republicans controlled Congress, it was their highest priority, they passed it, and he signed it. While they may have negotiated over the details amongst themselves, the process never required Trump to convince anyone to change their minds in order to get a deal.

In fact, there was not a single negotiation with Congress over that four years in which Trump used his skills to shepherd a piece of legislation across the finish line. Every time something tricky came up, like his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act or avert a government shutdown, he proved himself utterly incapable of negotiating an agreement. That was in part because he neither understood nor cared about other people’s preferences and incentives, and in part because everyone in Congress knew they couldn’t trust him to keep his word. “It’s always difficult, said Republican Sen. John Cornyn during negotiations over the government shutdown Trump forced in order to get funding for his border wall, “when the person you’re negotiating with is someone who changes their mind.” That shutdown, the longest in history, ended when Trump capitulated.

When the new Congress takes office in January, Republicans will pass a reconciliation bill into which they’ll throw as many of their priorities as possible, including extending the 2017 tax cuts. But don’t be surprised if there are no other real legislative achievements in the next four years, especially none that require Trump to hold together a fragile coalition and persuade members of Congress to take on political risk.

The image will remain

One might have thought that by now, the idea that Donald Trump is a terrific dealmaker would be met only with laughter. The fact that it isn’t shows that Trump’s belief that you can convince people of anything just by repeating it often and with confidence is basically right. The truth is that nearly all of the successful deals in Trump’s career were the easy ones — a foreign developer wants to license his name for their resort, they agree on a price, and it’s done. Sometimes he has lied and blustered his way to advantageous deals, which is more a testament to the gullibility of those foolhardy enough to lend him money or join with him in a partnership than to his cleverness.

But as president, he has an almost unblemished record of failure when it comes to dealmaking. And the next four years will show that the man who had a ghost writer pen The Art of the Deal (a sample of his brilliant insights: “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I'm after”) is more than ready to screw things up again.

Other things I wrote this week

At MSNBC, I argued that Senate Democrats are once again convinced that there is some political value to be gained by showing that they’re eager for bipartisanship, despite the fact that the voters have shown over and over that they just don’t care, and that’s not how effective opposition politics works.

At Heatmap, I argued that the outlook for climate politics for the next four years is bleak, but anyone concerned about the warming planet should embrace the fight.