Donald Trump boasts that he is the king of dealmakers. His 1987 ghostwritten bestseller, The Art Of The Deal, turned the New York City nepo babe into a national figure.
This in turn, led to him playing the boss in the TV show The Apprentice, and that became his calling card to becoming the president of the United States twice.
That, at least, is the view of men who bitterly regret giving Trump his leg-ups to the top. Tony Schwartz, the author who actually wrote The Art Of The Deal, now says it should have been called ‘The Sociopath’.
After his Non Disclosure Agreement expired, Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first season of The Apprentice, when it was called Meet The Billionaire, confessed “he was not, by any stretch, a successful New York real estate tycoon like we made him out to be”.
John Miller, the chief marketing officer for NBC who was in charge of crafting Trump’s TV image, admits “we created a monster”. He says Trump had a string of failures and bankruptcies behind him, but “people thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman”.
Nobody can take Trump’s electoral successes away from him. He has been elected president of the United States twice, most recently with a majority of the popular vote. Questions remain about the quality of his deal-making after the economic damage done around the world by his tariff plans, followed rapidly by his partial climbdown from them.
He is good at playing the big man for the cameras, but just how good a deal-maker is Donald Trump?
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And knowing what they know after the past 10 days, how should the 75 nations who Trump says are queuing up “to kiss my ass” negotiate with him?
Trump’s decision not to implement the big “reciprocal” tariffs he had announced against countries around the world brought relief. His closest advisors fanned out to insist that the rollercoaster ride he forced on the markets was all part of a cunning plan. The president had always planned to go into reverse, they claimed, even though he had repeatedly said he would not in the days following his big tariff reveal in the White House Rose Garden.
Trump’s tariff climbdown, posted on his Truth Social platform, was one in the eye for the US trade secretary Howard Lubnick, who had being telling the world “there is no postponing, they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks”.
Peter Navarro, the “brains” behind the tariff strategy, also had to eat his words but then he is a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks”, according to Elon Musk. Navarro laid down the law in The Financial Times hours after the original announcements. “This is not a negotiation,” he wrote then.
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After Trump’s retreat, he went on TV to bluster: “This is one of the greatest days in American economic history we have had. I think we’re going to call it the ‘art of the reciprocal trade deal’. I’ll tell ya, all the nervous Nellies on Wall Street who try to undermine us consistently underestimate the power of the president to negotiate.”
Flanked by an uneasy-looking treasury secretary Scott Bessent, Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, chided, “many of you in the media clearly missed The Art Of The Deal”. She claimed the president’s ploys had isolated China and left the rest of the world looking for deals with the US, “and they need this president in the Oval Office to talk to them”.
Leavitt seemed to be reaching for one of the tactics outlined in The Art Of The Deal – go over the top and ask for too much, so that when you negotiate down, you are still the winner.
By this logic, really big tariffs against individual major exporters to the US have been shelved, but the across-the-board 10% tariff has been left in place. This structural shift is vital to true believers in Trump’s plan to make Americans pay tax through what they buy rather than their earnings.
The trouble is that Trump blinked first and seemed to suggest that tariff threats were only a means to the end of a new ideal of “free trade”. Just as with his Ukraine plans, he made concessions in advance to the people he is negotiating against – President Putin in the case of his “peace plan” – without getting anything in return.
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The markets, especially government bond markets, have shown that this president does not have the muscle to impose his will regardless. The trading partners queuing for talks may be prepared to flatter, but they will be looking to negotiate down from the lower baseline he has conceded. For example, the UK and the European Union will be looking for lower tariffs against their cars, steel and iron, which the US needs and which the US rustbelt will be unable to replace any time soon.
Trump and his supporters are now trying to save face by suggesting that his moves have all really been about confronting China. At the time of writing, tariffs against the US’s only real match in terms of trade and military power have now reached an incredible 145%. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has reciprocated but kept well below the American level.
Having been threatened by the US, the rest of the world is unlikely to join America in a trade war against China. It is not their problem. Trump has shown that nearby countries such as Vietnam have nothing to gain from him. Instead, he has handed China the chance to pose as the upholder of international trade rules, in spite of its oppressive and antidemocratic policies.
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China has cut back its trade dependency on the US considerably in recent years, and its government is not accountable to voters. Donald Trump may find that the US does not have the leverage against China that it thinks it does. Ultimately, Trump is after a one-on-one big men meeting with President Xi.
The danger must be that in order to pose as a deal-maker, he once again makes concessions he should not, such as selling out Taiwan.
The supine, Republican-dominated US Congress has chosen not to contest Trump’s unrestrained exercise of executive power, however delusional and incompetent it may be.
He was only forced to reverse his main tariff moves because of market forces beyond his control. He had destabilised the whole US economy. Lots of his rich allies were losing money themselves. They will have made most of it back in the temporary stock market surge.
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Democrats are now demanding an inquiry into possible insider trading by Trump and his associates – although they are unlikely to get very far in Trump’s America.
That perhaps is the key to doing a deal with Donald Trump – as the British government appear to have concluded. Normal rules of statecraft or probity do not apply.
He does not care about the important matters at stake or even understand them. They are peripheral to the deal he wants to make. The art is to make sure there is an “upside” for him personally in any deal. Money and grotesque flattery are both acceptable forms of tribute to this president.
