Trump’s self-declared reputation as a world-class dealmaker continues to collapse
Nearly two weeks after Donald Trump boasted that a “peace” agreement with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” and the world could expect to learn more about the breakthrough deal “shortly,” officials from Tehran effectively walked away from the negotiating table. The American president with a notoriously short attention span told CNBC, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” adding that he thought the protracted talks had become “very boring.”
As for why, exactly, Iran backed away from the diplomatic efforts, there were three apparent causes. One was the increased U.S. military strikes, coupled with Israel’s ongoing incursion in Lebanon. But The Washington Post reported that Iranian negotiators were also surprised and displeased when Trump made last-minute changes to the terms of the deal that had been previously worked on by members of his own team.
This, alas, was not the first time the American president had undermined what U.S. negotiators had presented to Iranian officials.
It led Joe Cirincione, the vice chair of the Center for International Policy and a longtime expert on nuclear policy, to highlight an underappreciated observation: “Trump is perhaps the world’s worst negotiator.”
To be sure, Republicans not only reject this fact, the entire party’s vision of the party is built around the idea that Trump is a dealmaker without equal. During her tenure as the State Department’s chief spokesperson, Tammy Bruce told Fox Business, “President Trump is, as we know, the best dealmaker in the world.” Around the same time, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made related on-air comments, telling Fox News that Trump’s deal-making abilities are “unlike anything I think any of us have ever seen.”
But has anyone seen any evidence at all that Trump has had any success as a political dealmaker? The hype is certainly obvious and ubiquitous — I could retire if I had a dollar for every Republican who has referenced the president’s ghostwritten “Art of the Deal” — but proof that bolsters the partisan assumptions is elusive.
As The Atlantic’s David Graham explained last week:
Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant.
Unfortunately, the problem isn’t limited to foreign affairs and international diplomacy. As a candidate in 2016, Trump told Fox News, “The problem with Washington, they don’t make deals; it’s all gridlock. And then you have a president that signs executive orders because he can’t get anything done. I’ll get everybody together.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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