Donald Trump is full of stories about his negotiating prowess. Most of them are fiction, and even the ones based on a grain of truth are twisted and exaggerated to fit his standard heroic narrative:
- Often, no one has ever even negotiated the thing before Trump arrived. Why? Because they're stupid.
- His stories invariably involve crude threats.
- The other side then caves, usually by calling up Trump. Never because Trump called them.
Here are some examples. #4 and #6 are loosely based on things that actually happened. The others are just inventions of Trump's febrile imagination.
- John Deere: "I said, ‘If John Deere builds those plants, they’re not selling anything into the United States.’ They just announced yesterday they’re probably not going to build the plants, OK? I kept the jobs here.”
Reality: This simply never happened. - Apple CEO Tim Cook, who wanted an exemption from Trump's tariffs on China: "I said, look, I'm going to give you a one-year break but I want you to start building your factories in this country.... You have everything in China. I want you to move it from China back to our country. And he started doing that. He built a factory, a big one, in Texas."
Reality: The factory Trump is talking about was built in 2013, long before he was on the scene. - South Korea: "I told South Korea, you're going to have to pay for your military. We have 40,000 troops over there. You're going to have to pay.... They said, 'No no no, we will not pay, we will not. We haven't paid since the Korean War'.... $5 billion a year to start off with. They went crazy. They agreed to two. I got $2 billion for nothing.... You know what [Biden] did? They cut off the deal that I made where they were paying. They're back to nothing."
Reality: South Korea has been paying for US troops since 1991. Trump negotiated a routine small increase, but nothing more. Biden then negotiated another routine small increase. These negotiations are scheduled to take place every 3-4 years. - Emmanuel Macron, over a proposed French tax on tech companies: "He was going to tax American companies doing business in France.... I called him and I said, 'Emmanuel, you're taxing American companies.'... I said, here's the story: Every bottle of wine and champagne you send into the United States, effective immediately, and I'm signing it as we speak, I'm charging you 100%.... Calls me back in about three minutes, 'We have decided to remove the tax.'"
Reality: Macron did propose a tax on American tech companies doing business in Europe, and Trump did threaten to retaliate with tariffs. Macron wasn't able to get other European leaders on board and eventually withdrew the proposal. Trump's phone call is ridiculous fiction. - Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing, over a contract for upgraded Air Force Ones: "I said, 'Dennis, it's got to have a three. 5.7 is too much.'... So he calls up after two, three months.... 'Sir, 3 billion, 999 million, nine nine nine nine and 99 cents.' I said, you've got yourself a deal. Then I asked, 'Did nobody ever negotiate with you?' 'Well, not really, sir. It was just, this is the price, we'll take it.'"
Reality: The Air Force One contract was the subject of longstanding negotiations and the contract price varied over time. It was never as high as $5.7 billion, as Trump claimed, and never below $4 billion. Trump played virtually no role in the entire thing. - Central American countries refusing to accept deported criminals: "The generals told me, 'Sir, we can’t bring them back. The countries won’t accept MS-13 gang members. They won’t accept them.' And I said, 'Really? How much do we pay these various countries in terms of economic aid?'...Tell them they’re in default. They’re delinquent. We’re not paying them anymore because they won’t accept it. And you know what happened? They all called me. Every one of them. They said, 'We would be honored to take them back, sir. We would be honored.' It was so easy."
Reality: Trump did cut off aid to to several Central American countries, but it was because he wanted them to halt the flow of outbound migrants. It had nothing to do with deportations. Aid was restored after reaching normal agreements a few months later. Nobody called Trump begging for relief. - The Taliban, as told by Wesley Hunt: During these negotiations, Trump told Taliban leaders that he would kill them “if you harm a hair on a single American,” prompting the translator present with them to appear stunned. “And Trump goes, ‘Tell him. Just tell him what I said!’” Hunt said on The Sage Steele Show. “Reached into his pocket, pulled out a satellite photo of the leader of the Taliban’s home, and handed it to him, got up, and walked out the room.”
Reality: There's no record of this happening. The real story is that Trump was desperate to withdraw and negotiated an epically bad deal.
It's worth noting that it's widely agreed that Trump is historically a very poor negotiator. Early in his career he massively overpaid for a USFL team; the Eastern Shuttle; the Plaza Hotel; and his Atlantic City casinos. Then he went bankrupt. Since then he's overpaid for golf courses and hotels, which is why they make little to no money for him. His recent income has come mostly from The Apprentice and from licensing and management deals.
Trump tells these self-aggrandizing stories because he wants to believe them; his followers credit them for the same reason. Trump's delusions mirror those of his marks.
I think that your explanation is close. I don't believe that Trump is capable of analyzing, or distinguishing, truth as something that stands on its own; truth to him is whatever his wishes, desires, and imagination wants it to be.
It drives me nuts the people still describe Trump as a "businessman". Grifter is the more accurate description.
Kevin, I hear the frustration, it frustrates me too, to see one just lie at will, and 40% of the country just goes "HELL YA!!!"
I wish I knew how to counter this but here it's the choir you be preaching too. It needs to break the bubble somehow.
Nothing will break the bubble that his cult is in. We just have to hope that some semi sane Trump supporters or undecided voters come to their senses. I still can't believe it's this close. Lewis Black did a great bit on undecided voters.
His deal with the Taliban "We promise to leave and never come back if you promise not to shoot at us on the way out" was the right thing to do, but definitely wasn't a masterstroke of negotiating.
I'd call it a surrender rather than a negotiation.
releasing 5,000 taliban prisoners without consulting the afghan government was not the right thing to do. hell, the whole "negotiation" took place without the involvement of the afghans, and that was not the right thing to do. getting out was the right course of action, but as josef says ...
And then, the GOP criticizes Biden for withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Yeah, I know, expecting consistency or even an ounce of self-reflection from MAGAland is pointless...
" His recent income has come mostly from The Apprentice and from licensing and management deals."
And the greatest grift of all, the Presidency of the US.
Are we too polite to discuss the guy's narcissistic personality as a handicap? I mean, the press hushed up FDR's paralysis because it was irrelevant to the job, but this in-your-face pathology is pretty frickin' relevant.
To paraphrase someone, Trump isn't a billionaire, he's a clown living off of credit. His whole life is a mirage. Smoke and mirrors to mask the fact that if it weren't for the fact of being born rich he would be no where near as rich as he is. He would be selling used cars in Queens kind of rich.
Trump lies. In other news, dog bites man, water is wet, the sun rose in the east and the pope is Catholic.
Moot points. GOP knows this and doesn't care. Harris should be 10+ points up but add up the GOP trifecta and you've got a nail biter
- Big Business will always be red for lower taxes and liabilities. Nothing else matters to them
- MAGA is still red because he will stick it to the Libs. Nothing else matters to them
- Ruperts tells his listeners how awful a blue ticket would be. Nothing else matters to him.
GOP leadership and their business guys know this, but I doubt the average MAGA voter does. They live in their own bubble and take him at mostly face value.
What I don't understand about the business guys is how short-sighted they are. The economy has performed better under Democractic administrations for decades. Maybe they get taxed a little more, but the people that buy their stuff have money to spend, and there are more of them. That means business will be booming.
What he counts on is that neither his devoted fans nor the conservative media ecosystem will ever skeptically follow up on any of this. They take it at face value, because they like him and he's a dumb's guy idea of what a successful businessman should look like.
In fact, they get angry if that media ecosystem ever says otherwise - remember how Fox News was dealing with angry viewers defecting to other news sources because they called Arizona correctly for Trump, and they didn't want to hear any bad news from their infotainment?
“[T]the epistemic capture in the US of poor and working class whites by conservatives, billionaires and propagandists is one of the great social engineering success stories of the last half century. This includes an informational ecosystem that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of because it simultaneously stimulates fear and anger responses, degrades one’s own ability to reason, and breeds mistrust in outside sources and political points of view. In other words: cult conditioning.” - John Scalzi
If it was only this, standard run of the mill politicians taking credit for stuff as to which there is no causal effect, Trump would not be as scary.
What makes the present so awful is a combination of:
(1) Trump knows that a significant percentage of his voters are actually very, very anti regulation when it comes to whatever they say. They got off the "anti discrimination bus" at somewhere along the line which contained "lynching" (OK, no more lynching) and restrictive deed covenants (OK, I guess brown people can buy houses anywhere) and segregated public schools (OK, guess we can't keep brown kids out, but we can keep the poor out, so that is almost as good). They are not on board with current restrictions (especially DEI pointing out that generations of white people treated black people as property) on what they actually say. This is one reason they not only vote for Trump but love him, he says any goddamed thing, and they wish that they too, could go back to the days where they could say any goddamed thing.
(2) Trump also believes, not just in a lack of restrictions on certain types of speech, but that total bullshit is an acceptable form of speech at any time. There was a time when Kevin's list would have given a politician pause, but Trump has lowered that bar to where its underneath the actual ground.
and finally (3) since government is a joke, making all taxation theft, truth in a statement by the President is not even required. I bet he has never spent a minute wondering whether what he says is actually true. Its enough if its sort of true to him.
You know, there's a whole social system that has been organized around the tough buy throwing threats around and bullying other people into compliance. It is actually pretty threatened at the moment, and so it escalates. Which is basically the standard play in this playbook.
So Trump is basically articulating the mythology behind this playbook. The people who believe it *need* to believe it because their lives have the same organization. This isn't good for them, but it's the best they have known - having a bully in charge that seems to like you and be concerned with the same things you are.
They can't afford to question this whole scheme - that's dangerous, unfamiliar ground. And he or the others might turn on *you*. So much fear there. It isn't easily overcome.
I certainly agree that Trump is a laughably bad negotiator. There is a reason everyone was laughing at the US when he was President. And his version of events make him sound like an 8 year old trying to sound important, but facts are facts. I'll repost what I posted a few days ago:
Wait a minute. I agree that the Air Force One thing initially made Trump look like a chump. It looked like Boeing just agreed to the original price and then made up a higher price to placate Trump. But then in 2022 Boeing CEO said that he regrets making the deal. A quick google search turns up:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/27/boeing-ceo-regrets-deal-with-trump-for-new-air-force-one-jets-that-will-cost-company-1-billion/
Along with various other articles.
"Boeing has lost $660 million developing two Air Force One 747 jets following a “very unique” 2018 deal with then President Donald Trump that placed liability for cost changes on the company rather than on taxpayers, CEO Dave Calhoun reportedly told investors Wednesday."
"Calhoun remarked that Boeing “probably should not have taken” the fixed-price $3.9 billion contract, which was revised to make the company responsible for cost changes after Trump insisted that the original arrangement was too pricey."
"The project’s spiraling expenses were driven by rising supplier costs, rising technical costs and scheduling difficulties, the company said in its quarterly report Wednesday."
"The Air Force One deal was personally negotiated with Trump by then Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was removed from the company in 2019 after being accused of mismanaging the company’s response to two deadly 737 MAX plane crashes."
Because so many defense contractors are so bad at what they do, if they can't pass on their mistakes and inefficiencies to the government they lose money. So if you want to see Boeing lose money, then Trump actually did something right.
Well, he does have a reputation for screwing over his suppliers. In this case it happened to be the country's largest aerospace company, but whatever.
I think the lesson here isn't that Trump was so savvy, but that the CEO of Boeing and his team were idiots. In no other defense contract would Boeing have agreed to shoulder all the cost overruns. They did this because they thought it would flatter Trump and he'd make sure Republicans in Congress steered business their way and figured "what are the chances...?" Kind of blew up in their face, though.
Boeing screwed up (not for the first time of late). They planned on saving money by using brand new 747's originally built for a now defunct Russion airline. It turns out all the special equipment on Air Force 1 essentially requires the planes to be rebuilt including redoing hundreds of miles of wiring. To make things worse the 747 is certified as a civilian aircraft under FAA standards. This means all the new equipment not previously covered by the original certification needs to be tested and qualified to FAA standards, a far longer and more expensive procedure than required for military aircraft.
The Apprentice. More like the sorcerer’s apprentice. And trump plays Mickey Mouse! MSNBC interviewed some NBC guy who was involved in production of that show a bit ago. I want to kick his ass.
Like litteraly every other "reality" show there is, the Apprentice was staged theater and had little to do with reality. A phoney show hosted by a giant phoney.
About #7, Jimmy Kimmel played a clip of Glenn Beck discussing this with Donald. Beck breathlessly relates how Trump said if any Americans were hurt, he would kill the leader of the Taliban and then silently slipped a piece of paper to the leader which had a picture of the guy's house, then got up and left without saying a word. Trump's reply was "well, it was a phone meeting". Kimmel comment "it's not a great sign when you get fact checked by Donald Trump".
Glenn Beck segment starts about 13:00:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn-Dw2JUVmo&t=907s
The fourth aspect of his typical narrative is everyone calls him "sir".