Mick Hartley

A smart analysis by Daniel Finkelstein in the Times – Trump’s deals thrive on debt he can’t repay:

“I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

With these words Donald Trump opened his bestselling 1987 book The Art of the Deal. And years later, in 2015, launching his bid for the presidency in the lobby of Trump Tower, he referred back to his love affair with negotiation: “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.”…

There are three problems with citing his authorship of The Art of the Deal as establishing Trump’s credentials as a president. The first is that he didn’t write it. The book was written by his co-author Tony Schwartz, who suggested the title and the basic idea as a way of writing the memoir Trump had accepted a commission to produce. Trump wasn’t able to write a book; he didn’t even read them.

Schwartz found Trump to have an almost impossibly short attention span and little interest in explaining himself. The ghostwriter ended up listening in to his subject’s phone calls, which Trump enjoyed because it allowed him to show off. Schwartz was mainly struck by how much lying Trump did.

Which leads to the second problem: there is very little in The Art of the Deal about the art of deals. What there is Schwartz had to confect. Including the stuff about not being interested in money (an assertion Schwartz laughs at) and all the guff about poetry (“He was incapable of saying something like that. It wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.”) So Trump did big deals but was not some theorist of negotiations.

The third problem about The Art of the Deal is that so many of the triumphant transactions it celebrates either never completed or collapsed after they did. Television City and the tallest building in the world weren’t built, the US Football League folded, the Trump Golden Series Cadillac never got beyond a prototype and, famously, his Atlantic City casino enterprise turned into a nightmare of debt that almost finished him off altogether.

It is also notable that many of the professional and personal relationships he boasts of in 1987 have long since ended in acrimony or court or both. The only ones that have remained consistent are the feuds….

The thing that most characterises Trump’s business career is that he is a huge borrower, occasionally toppling over into hopeless debt. Sometimes he does this on instinct. He took on one disastrous loan of hundreds of millions of dollars without even setting foot in the business he was buying. A borrower is a better way of understanding him than merely thinking of him as a dealmaker.

As president of the United States, Trump has inherited a vast amount of power, built up through investment in the military and in political diplomacy. His country has achieved leadership of the free world by establishing alliances and offering security to other nations in return for their allegiance and co-operation. He is now borrowing against that, essentially consuming the US stock of power, friendships and credibility. He is trying to turn those long-term relationships into immediate cash, either by reducing defence expenditure or even forcing former allies effectively to lend to the US at favourable rates. Any risk to liberal democracy he prices very cheaply.

It is not hard to see why this might prove immediately successful. The US has a lot of power and in a single transaction — you do this or I will impose a tariff on you; you do that or I will stop arming Ukraine — its position is hard to resist. But any real theory of the art of the deal would note that most transactions are not isolated events. They are the result of repeated engagements. And for repeated engagements you require trust. Trump is consuming the trust that so many of his predecessors invested in.

Once, the Trump casino business was a wonder to behold. But Trump Plaza closed in 2014 and was demolished in 2021, the Trump Marina was sold in 2011 and became the Golden Nugget, and the Trump Taj Mahal closed in 2016. Roll up, roll up — and place your bets on the future of the Trump White House.

He is, in old parlance, a con-man. A huckster. He talks the MAGA talk, but he's selling all the goodwill the US has accrued over the years in the cause of his own ego.