Politico does a piece on the ‘real’ Donald J. Trump deal making….
Trump back in the day ?
Isn’t Trump today as President of the United State’s….
His ego isn’t enough these days…
“I’m a negotiator. I’ve done very well over the years through negotiation,” he said in a Republican debate in 2016.
“That’s what I do, is deals,” he said last month. “I know deals, I think, better than anybody knows deals,” he added.
But these past 16 months of Trump’s presidency have shown that whatever skills Trump thinks he acquired over the course of his business career haven’t necessarily translated to his work in the White House. The failed repeal-and-replace health care negotiations, bungled efforts to get funding from Mexico for his promised border wall, the pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal—Trump has proven to be more adept at breaking deals than making deals. And the sudden and bizarre scuttling of his meeting with murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore—and now might be back on again—is only the latest data point that suggests he’s either not as good at negotiating as he promised he was, or that negotiating with disparate factions of Congress or in geopolitically fraught international arenas is harder than he thought it would be and harder than anything he’s ever done. The truth, according to negotiation experts who have studied Trump’s track record, people who have negotiated for him and against him, associates, biographers and former employees, is that it’s all of that.
Trump was, and still is, they say, a confident, competitive, aggressive, impulsive, zero-sum, win-at-all-costs, transactional, unpredictable, often underinformed and ill-prepared, gut-following, ego-driven, want-it-and-want-it-now negotiator. His self-burnished image as a tip-top deal-maker long has obscured an actual record that is far more mixed, pocked with moves and acquisitions that scratched a passing itch but created massive financial problems later. His best work, too, was his earliest work. Trump was at his most patient, his most diligent, his most attentive and his most creative—his most effective—some 35 to 45 years ago, when he was intent on pile-driving into the cultural bedrock powerful storylines on which he would build his career as a celebrity business tycoon.
At no point, though, in the past nearly half a century—from the shrewd, well-timed talks that led to the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to the agreements behind The Art of the Deal and “The Apprentice”—did Trump’s negotiations in real estate and entertainment circles prepare him fully for the degree of nuance and complexity he now faces as president….
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But regardless of what happens from here, a former Trump Organization executive told me, Trump will do what he does. He will try to spin it into a win.
“He believes he’s in a position of strength no matter where or when he is,” the executive said. “You have to understand that. If you knock Donald on his ass, he will tell you the best position to be in is on your ass.”
More…
Note….
Actually?
He seems like he’s begging things on the North Korea front while walking blindly into a big hole on tariffs….