Trump Doesn’t Know the First Thing About Negotiating

The result is that all of his foreign policy initiatives are failing or have already failed

Editor’s note: Having read Never Split the Difference, a book on effective negotiating by one Christopher Voss, who had spent 30 years as an FBI hostage negotiator, the idea an obvious simpleton and would-be bully like Trump knew anything about “the art of the deal” has always been absurd to me. The FBI negotiators attempt to find out as much as possible about the situation and their counterparts, including their emotional state, and then invite the other side to put themselves in their shoes. Something Trump who is Bush-like in his disinterest about the world is simply not capable of.


Michael Hirsh reminds us that Trump has always been a lousy negotiator:

Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer who interviewed him many times, agrees with Lapidus that there is no discernible difference in the way Trump negotiates today, as president, compared to his career in business.

“His style involves a hostile attitude and a bullying method designed to wring every possible concession out of the other side while maximizing his own gain,” D’Antonio said.

“As he explained to me, he’s not interested in ‘win-win’ deals, only in ‘I win’ outcomes. When I asked if he ever left anything on the table as a sign of goodwill so that he might do business with the same party in the future he said no, and pointed out that there are many people in the world he can work with, one at a time.”

As we have seen, Trump’s bullying, maximalist approach does not work with other governments, and this approach cannot work because the president sees everything as a zero-sum game and winning requires the other side’s capitulation. The result is that no government gives Trump anything and instead all of them retaliate in whatever way is available to them.

He can’t agree to a mutually beneficial compromise because he rejects the idea that the other side might come away with something. Because every existing agreement negotiated in the past has required some compromise on our government’s part, he condemns all of them as “terrible” because they did not result in the other party’s surrender.

He seems particularly obsessed with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) because the trade-off inherent in any agreement made with Iran was that they would regain access to frozen assets, and he ignorantly equates this with “giving” them money. The fact that the JCPOA heavily favored the U.S. and the rest of the P5+1 doesn’t interest Trump. Iran was allowed to come away with something at the end, and even the little bit they were able to get is far too much for him.

This is one reason he has been so closely aligned with Iran hawks over the last four years, and it helps explain why he endorses absurd, unrealistic demands and “maximum pressure” of collective punishment. He is doing more or less the same thing he has always done, and he is so clueless about international relations and diplomacy that he still thinks it can get him what he wants. The reality is that all of his foreign policy initiatives are failing or have already failed, and the costs for ordinary people in the targeted countries and here at home keep going up.

Here is another relevant point from the article:

“Temperamentally, the president is unprepared for diplomacy and negotiations with sovereign states,” said D’Antonio. “He doesn’t know how to practice the give-and-take that would produce bilateral or multilateral achievements and he takes things so personally that he considers those with a different point of view to be enemies. He is offended when others decline to be bullied and angered by those who counter his proposals with their own ideas.”

The greatest trick that Trump pulled on Americans was to make many of them believe that he understood how to negotiate when he has never been any good at it. Now the U.S. and many other countries around the world are paying the price.

Source: The American Conservative

3 Comments
  1. CHUCKMAN says

    Below is a picture of Trump caught in the very act of negotiating. Impressive stuff.

    https://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.com/2018/06/john-chuckman-grotesques-trump-donald.html

  2. skinnerreturns says

    He is a one trick pony, as Iran and N Korea have shown.

    He threatens big, then he thinks you are beautiful, and backs down.

    A child can read his moves, and as for his back-up, idiots who run their lives and ours, to the tune of a religious cult called Rapture!

    Any chance 10Pence and Pompous will go to Guyana?

  3. John C Carleton says

    If the trickster trumpeter knew anything about negotiating, he would not have paid $30,000.00 for a roll in the hay with a worn out porn “star”, when a fresh prostitute could have been had in most American cities for $20.00.

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