If you listen to his fans, Donald Trump is a brilliant deal-maker and negotiator. He literally wrote the book on the art of deal-making, and he has promised repeatedly, endlessly, to put that skill to work to make America great again.
As his biggest fan of all once put it:
Since Trump became president, however, we have seen no evidence of that legendary skill set. We’ve seen no trade deals negotiated or renegotiated, no major deals cut with Congress or the Democrats, no deals worked out with other countries on Iran or North Korea or the Middle East or climate change … nothing.
A couple of things are key to understanding that failure:
1.) As Trump sees the world, there are two parties to any deal: the winner, and the loser. Trump needs to see himself as the winner, and the fear that he might be seen as the loser is paralyzing to him.
2.) In business, Trump has an idea what winning looks like. He knows what he wants out of a deal, and he knows what he’s willing to do to get it. In Washington, he doesn’t have a clue. He has no idea what winning means or how to measure it. He doesn’t have concrete policy goals that he wants to achieve; he wants whatever outcome brings him universal applause. And as Republicans and Democrats are all discovering, you just can’t negotiate with someone who has no idea what he wants.
Put another way, Trump is acting like a rube in the big city, way over his head and paralyzed by fear that he’s going to get taken by people smarter and slicker than he is. The problem is, he’s right to feel that way.
In a televised meeting with congressional leaders a week ago, for example, Trump railed against the visa lottery program and demanded that it be ended.
“Countries come in and they put names in a hopper,” Trump said in describing the program. “They’re not giving you their best names; common sense means they’re not giving you their best names. They’re giving you people that they don’t want … they put people that they don’t want into a lottery and the United States takes those people.”
That is just blithering nonsense. Other countries don’t nominate their citizens for the U.S. visa lottery; foreign governments play no role in the process whatsoever. Individuals nominate themselves, and they do so by going to the U.S. embassy and filling out application forms.
If they are deemed to meet education and skills requirements, and if they pass the interview and have no criminal background, they join the 15 to 20 million other people around the world hoping that their name will be one of the 50,000 drawn annually. The individuals with the initiative to go through all that, those with the guts to then move to a foreign country and start all over again, are not “the worst of the worst” selected by their government to be dumped on America, as Trump describes them. They “self-select” as motivated, hard-working and courageous.
But here’s the thing:
Trump has been president for a year now. Immigration is his signature issue. It takes all of 45 seconds to read and comprehend the two previous paragraphs about how the visa lottery actually works. Yet Trump has not performed even that minimal task.
If you lack that basic level of knowledge, you cannot possibly be effective in negotiations. You have no idea whether the deal you’re being offered is good or bad, you have no ability to craft a counter offer and you have no ability to tell when you’re being manipulated, whether by your own staff or by others. You are helpless.
Again, take a look at that televised meeting. At one point, Trump seemed to accept a deal with the Democrats on the fate of the Dreamers, pulling back only when his fellow Republicans intervened to tell him that’s a bad idea. That’s not exactly the act of a hard-boiled, keen-edged negotiator.
At another point, Trump announced that he would sign anything that Congress brought him, that he himself had no real demands.
“I think my positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with,” he said. “If they come to me with things that I’m not in love with, I’m going to do it, because I respect them.”
In that meeting, Trump also bragged that he was willing to accept any political backlash that might come in accepting a deal on immigration.
“I’ll take the heat, I don’t care. I don’t care — I’ll take all the heat you want to give me, and I’ll take the heat off both the Democrats and the Republicans,” he told congressional leadership. “My whole life has been heat.”
We’ll see, but I very much doubt that is true. From Trump’s perspective, the only thing that he might get out of the deal, the only thing that makes it worthwhile to him, is public approval. He wants the joy of bragging that he finally solved a problem that had defied the best efforts of President Obama and President Bush. He wants to bask in the glow of being the Dreamers’ savior. That’s a lot of motivation.
On the other hand, he also wants to make sure that he doesn’t anger his anti-immigrant base and the hosts of “Fox & Friends.” He doesn’t want to disappoint John Kelly, Stephen Miller, his pal Ann Coulter and all those people wearing MAGA hats. He doesn’t want them to accuse him of losing, of giving in, of being weak on “amnesty” and surrendering.
He wants credit for reaching a compromise, without the anger that a compromise will bring. Trump is at loggerheads with Trump, and neither man is winning.
About the Author
