The author of Donald Trump’s book 'The Art of the Deal' Tony Schwartz told The New Yorker he regrets presenting Trump as 'more appealing than he is.'IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST/The New York Times
Earlier this week, inauguration day turned into a live demonstration of what it’s like to negotiate with Donald Trump.
The President had been dangling the threat of 25-per-cent tariffs on Canada, ostensibly to force a tighter border, or because this country’s trade surplus with the U.S. is a scam, or simply because it was a muscular thing to do. That would be economically ruinous for Canada (and for Mr. Trump’s own people, though that seems not to have occurred to him), so everyone began lighting their hair on fire as they figured out how to respond.
But on the morning of the inauguration, reports emerged that tariffs were off the table, at least for the moment, and Canadian companies, markets and political leaders heaved a sigh of very tentative relief.
Cut to that evening in the Oval Office, when a reporter asked about tariffs. The President, with the air of someone pondering which takeout he wanted for dinner, said he was thinking of 25-per-cent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, and Feb. 1 seemed like a start.
Back to hair on fire.
Mr. Trump has spent decades seeking attention by branding himself as the quintessential tycoon, so there’s a vast public library of his musings on negotiation tactics that might help make sense of what he’s doing and what he wants.
His 1987 book The Art of the Deal was key to making Mr. Trump a household name. Tony Schwartz was his ghostwriter, and by the time Mr. Trump ran for president in 2016, the former journalist so regretted his role in the myth-making that he spilled his guts to The New Yorker.
Mr. Trump’s minuscule attention span made it impossible to conduct the interviews that would normally inform such a book. So instead, Mr. Schwartz shadowed him for 18 months and then invented a more appealing version of the man he had come to think of as “a living black hole,” he said.
Donald Trump returns to the White House, and his ways
“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after,” Mr. Schwartz wrote in Mr. Trump’s voice. “Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
And so you have the President calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the “governor” of a future 51st state and musing about using economic force to annex Canada. This establishes the hostile takeover of a sovereign neighbour as his opening bid and tries to force everyone to work backwards from there.
At another point in the book, Mr. Trump describes some railyards he wanted to buy and how he made a show of trashing the neighbourhood, the potential for the property and the notion that anyone would want it.
“If you want to buy something, it’s obviously in your best interest to convince the seller that what he’s got isn’t worth very much,” Mr. Trump says.
Straight out of that playbook, this week Mr. Trump dismissed the goods the U.S. imports from Canada in huge quantities as so much extraneous trash.
“We don’t need their lumber, because we have our own forests,” he said in a virtual address to the World Economic Forum on Thursday. “We don’t need their oil and gas. We have more than anybody.”
In 2004, another big piece of the Trumpian myth clicked into place with The Apprentice. The entire conceit of the show – an enormously successful mogul mentors promising young upstarts – rested on a lie. In reality, as reported extensively by The New York Times, the roaring success of the show saved Mr. Trump when he was yet again deep in the red.
In one episode, he stood on a tarmac with a Trump-branded plane behind him that he said he’d gotten for a song. “I built an empire on negotiation,” he told his wannabe apprentices.
“Negotiation is a very, very delicate art,” he said. “Sometimes you have to be tough. Sometimes you have to be as sweet as pie. You never know, it depends on who you’re dealing with.”
In the boardroom at the end of each episode, everyone would sit waiting for him until he stepped through a heavy wooden door – a fake set because his real offices were too tatty – like a medieval pope. Before barking “You’re fired,” his questions were always about who had earned respect or contempt, who screwed up, who was a loser.
Eugene Kogan, who teaches negotiation at Harvard University’s division of continuing education, wrote a paper in 2019 sketching out the roles Mr. Trump plays. First, the President is the observer, sizing up his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses; then he’s the performer, constantly seeking media attention to exert more leverage; and finally he is the disrupter, operating from his gut and using unpredictability as a weapon.
“Trump is a coercive negotiator: spotting and exploiting vulnerability is his trade; leverage and bravado are his tools,” Mr. Kogan wrote. “His first preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options, giving him both immediate maximum leverage as well as the opportunity to draw a sharp contrast between the other party’s eagerness to negotiate and his magnanimity in doing so given his many purportedly superior options.”
Please see: the entire recent storyline around Canadian tariffs.
Also in 2019, Thomas Kochan, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a paper examining what business negotiators might learn from Mr. Trump. Interestingly, he did not concur with the President’s own assessments that his tactics lead to endless winning.
“He seeks and values admiration and personal gratification, a behavioural trait that makes him vulnerable to overvaluing small concessions when combined with deferential (authentic or feigned) demonstrations of respect,” Mr. Kochan wrote, which is a nicely academic way to point out that someone who really likes being sucked up to is easier to dupe.
The professor also predicted that “experienced business negotiators” would simply avoid working with anyone who behaves like Mr. Trump because trust and stability are too important.
Unfortunately for Canada, the option to walk away disappears when the hollering deal-maker with the endless preening need to claim a win is your next-door neighbour with the world’s largest economy tucked into his back pocket.