Is US President Donald Trump a good deal-maker?
Is the US President as good at doing deals as he thinks he is?
“I’m a good deal-maker; that’s what I do,” says Donald Trump. It’s what the former New York real estate mogul has been saying ever since he became America’s 45th president and it’s one of the key reasons he is in the White House today. Whenever The Deal travels through Trump’s voting heartlands in middle America, people mention one reason above all others why they cast their vote for Trump. “He’s a businessman, not a politician,” they say, “and we need a businessman to run America.”
Through his book, The Art of the Deal, and his reality TV show The Apprentice, Trump has marketed himself as the ultimate deal-maker. In practice, his record as a deal-maker in the business world has been mixed. His companies filed for bankruptcy protection at least four times, but he’s also had his share of major successes. His current net worth is assessed by Bloomberg at a healthy $US2.8 billion ($3.9 billion).
But how easily can you transpose deal-making skills from the business world to politics, diplomacy and the world stage?
“I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I’m after,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, yet his record as a deal-maker in the White House is as mixed as it has been in business. Whatever deals Trump does as president are inevitably interpreted through a partisan political lens. Whether they’re good or bad is largely in the eye of the beholder; there is no bottom line or profit figure to point to.
Take his most unusual deal as President – his de-nuclearisation agreement with North Korean President Kim Jong-un.
Trump began his term by raising the heat on Kim like no other president had. He denounced North Korea’s Supreme Leader as “little rocket man” and threatened to rain “fire and fury” on the Hermit Kingdom unless Kim halted his nuclear and missile programs. If it was a bluff, it worked. China took Trump’s threats seriously enough to approve the heaviest United Nations sanctions in history against North Korea, its closest ally.
Then in March Kim made the surprise offer to meet Trump and discuss the future of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Trump claims credit for the strategy that ended up bringing Kim to the table. But when he began negotiating the terms of their historic summit meeting in Singapore, the President “started high” by saying he would accept nothing short of North Korea’s immediate denuclearisation as an outcome. As the summit drew closer, however, amid fears that Kim might pull out Trump retreated to a more pragmatic position, saying only that the summit was the start of a process. He softened his demands on North Korea to turn the prospects of a nuclear deal with Kim into the art of the possible, rather than stick with his initial hard-line, take-it-or-leave it position. In the end, Trump received a promise from Kim to de-nuclearise his country, but with no roadmap or timeline for doing so.
So was that a deal worthy of the paper it was written on? Trump’s critics say no. They argue that Kim played Trump by giving false hope that he would destroy his nuclear weapons and that by simply meeting with Kim the President handed him a propaganda victory. They say Trump squandered his “leverage” over him and received nothing concrete in return.
But Trump’s supporters argue that the deal was worthwhile and has already made the world safer. Although they concede there is a long way to go before North Korea makes good on any promise to get rid of its nukes, they say the deal has already proved its worth.
First, the rogue nuclear regime and the US are not hurling insults at each other and engaging in dangerous brinksmanship. Second, North Korea has halted both its long-range missile tests and its nuclear weapons tests. Both of these developments, they argue, are a major win for the world community.
Trump’s style of deal-making is an intensely personal one. He likes to meet people face-to-face, assess them and try to work his charm on them. With Kim, he predicted he would know within minutes of being in the same room whether he could make a deal with the dictator.
“Just my touch, my feel; that’s what I do,” Trump said ahead of their meeting. “I think that very quickly I’ll know whether or not something good is going to happen.”
He has tried to use the same personal connection with less success in his deal-making efforts with China. He invested much time meeting face-to-face twice with Chinese President Xi Jinping last year and striking what Trump describes as a “friendship” with his opposite number.
‘Even the most difficult and elusive deal in the world today – peace between Israel and the Palestinians – is one Trump claims he can pull off.’
Trump has tried to play good cop/bad cop with China since then to broker a trade deal. He has tried to use his relationship with Xi as leverage, while at the same time bashing China on trade and hitting it with tariffs to try to persuade Beijing to agree to narrow the imbalance of trade with the US. “President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade,” Trump has tweeted. “China will take down its Trade Barriers because it is the right thing to do.”
When Trump does not get the deal he wants, he is willing to pay hardball. This includes taking on America’s friends.
On trade, he has been willing to impose steel and aluminium tariffs on US allies Canada, Mexico and the European Union. In Europe, he has savaged America’s NATO allies for not agreeing quickly enough to his demands that they pay more for their collective defence.
Some point out that Trump has been more of a deal-breaker than a deal-maker as president. He has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, among others. But his negotiating skills have also helped secure the passage of a historic package of tax cuts, one of the signature achievements of his presidency.
Yet there are many deals Trump has promised and still not delivered on, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act (dubbed Obamacare) and getting Mexico to pay for his much-touted border wall. Despite this, his optimism about his deal-making capacity – at least in public – knows no bounds.
Even the most difficult and elusive deal in the world today – peace between Israel and the Palestinians – is one Trump claims he can pull off. “It is something that I think is frankly, maybe, not as difficult as people have thought over the years,” he said last year when discussing the prospects for a peace deal.
Whether or not you think Trump is an effective deal-maker, there is no doubting that he is an effective marketer of his claims to brokering deals.
It will be up to Americans in November 2020 to render their verdict on whether electing a self-proclaimed deal-maker from the business world into the White House was a success.
As he said in his book: “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”