“The Art of the Deal” opens with an exhausting fly-on-the-wall account of a week in the life of Donald Trump the real-estate shark. He’s never still, always on the phone and cranking out deal-after-deal with big business pals.
The president hoped the first 100 days of his second term would uncork a similar torrent of dealmaking as depicted in the seminal text of Trumpism.
But Trump has softened his tone on his trade war with China; he blinked over reciprocal tariffs on dozens of other nations; and he is fast losing patience with the Ukraine war, which he had predicted he’d end in 24 hours. Deals are proving more elusive when the stakes are not skyscrapers and casinos but entire economies, the credibility of powerful foreign leaders and national sovereignty.
Trump’s belief that every policy issue is a win-lose proposition has dominated his return to the White House – and has led to some nominal successes.
He’s worked out, for example, how to use his considerable executive authority as leverage against an adversary. By threatening to cut security clearances, he won concessions from some top law firms. By brandishing billions of dollars in government funding, he flexed power over several top universities. This is all ethically and constitutionally questionable. But it’s all about chalking up “wins.”
Trump’s fellow businessmen understand the game. The president offered an opt-out from 145% Chinese tariffs to iPhones following an “Art of the Deal”-style call with Apple CEO Tim Cook.
But the president is also finding out that geopolitics and global trade negotiations have little in common with selling a condo.
China and Ukraine resist Trump’s pressure
So far, the endless stream of stunning trade deals predicted by the president’s staff after he paused many tariffs for 90 days hasn’t materialized.
China has balked at being bullied.
And despite the president’s growing fury, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has refused so far to accept onerous US conditions for ending the war started by Russian President Vladimir Putin – who has received no such pressure.
If Trump does pull a fair peace deal out of the hat in Ukraine, he’ll potentially save tens of thousands of lives and end three years of vicious killing. If he can rebalance US trade with China, he’ll go some way to redressing economic injustices in industrialized regions gutted by globalization.
None of these initiatives are closed. But they are all testing the core mythology of Trump as dealmaker that is crucial to his political appeal.
He caricatured his own approach taken to its logical and cruel extremes earlier this year when he suggested moving Gaza’s entire population of more than 2 million people out of the territory devastated by Israel’s war with Hamas. He promised that this feat of ethnic cleansing would allow the US to build the “Riviera of the Middle East” with no thought of the dignity and sovereignty of Palestinians.
Not surprisingly, his hopes for forging Middle East peace have stalled.
Trump steps back on his China trade war
China’s President Xi Jinping doesn’t do diplomacy by phone.
Beijing’s preference for formal, painstaking lower-level talks among officials before presidents meet means Trump’s approach to his China trade war was questionable from the start – as was the idea that Xi would bend following the humiliation of facing 145% tariffs that Trump slapped on Chinese goods. After all, his nationalist political project is based on remaking a world that he regards as unfairly shaped by American power.