Politics
Trump’s Art of the Deal Is Back, Baby
The former president’s mix of brashness and pragmatism can unleash America’s already existing strengths.
Donald Trump’s July 18 acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention offered a window into his personalized way of doing business—including the public’s business.
Recalling the July 13 attempt on his life that left another man dead and two others wounded, Trump said, “I am very proud to say that over the past few days, we’ve raised $6.3 million for the families…including from a friend of mine just called up…$1 million, from Dan Newlin.”
So no need to wait for insurance, or Social Security, which is, in Trumpian terms, penny-ante, anyway. Better to move big money around at the speed of PayPal. Dan Newlin is a big-time trial lawyer in Orlando, Florida; he wins, too. Beyond the shoutout he enjoyed before a nationwide audience—what’s the earned-media benefit of that?— Newlin was quick to trumpet his connection to the Trump-Vance ticket.
Trump is not the first public official, nor even the first president, to highlight social media campaigns, including fundraising appeals.
Yet Trump is surely the boldest, even the brazenest, at mixing private wealth and public purposes. Back in the 1980s, at the dawn of his public career, Trump bought full-page newspaper ads criticizing American foreign policy and, separately, calling for the death penalty.
Since then, he’s become more skilled at leveraging other people’s money to make his points, and yet he has always sought the counsel of peer machers, huddling in Trump Tower and, more often, Mar-a-Lago. Wherever he is, he’s never been shy about ballsy asks.
As he wrote in his 1987 memoir, The Art of the Deal, “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.” From an entrepreneur, there’s nothing remarkable about this statement; the difference with Trump is that he took his always-be-closing style to the White House.
For instance, in 2019, President Trump had the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark. His adviser Larry Kudlow, another New York business guy, said, “We’re looking at it…. Greenland is a strategic place. They’ve got a lot of valuable minerals…. The president, who knows a thing or two about buying real estate, wants to take a look.”
Alas, nothing came of the idea; the green Danes seem happy keeping a territory one-quarter the size of the U.S. as a sort of frozen national park, never mind the trillions in resources. No wonder it’s poor and sparsely populated; things would perk up if Greenland could become Trumpland, boasting not only mines, but also ski chalets and casinos.
Trump has always intertwined business and politics, even international politics. Back in 1987, he journeyed to the Soviet Union to pursue a Trump Tower in Moscow—and so inadvertently launched a never-ending conspiracy theory.
In the White House, he kvelled about his personal effectiveness with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un. Observers can question his success in those enterprises, and yet it’s undeniable that he, in his un-briefed brashness, free from State Department tutelage, succeeded in nudging NATO countries to spend more on their own defense.
Even more remarkably, Trump dispatched his businessman son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to redefine the Middle East, from geopolitical trap to giant real estate transaction. The usual-suspect foreign-policy panjandrums declared Kushner’s plan “dead on arrival.” But then, a year later, Trump signed the Abraham Accords.
Without a doubt, the Gaza fighting has put a pall on the Middle East, yet the Accords are still in place, and a Trump project in Oman seems to be moving forward. Guns talk loudly, but money, too, can speak up.
Trump insists Gaza never would have erupted if he had remained in office. Is that credible? As Trump wrote back in 1987, “The final key to the way I promote is bravado…. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.” (For that huge-selling book, ghostwriter Tony Schwartz was the “with,” and yet there’s no doubt that we’re hearing, here, the true voice of Trump.)
Now Trump is eager to work his self-identified magic on Gaza. Yet intriguingly, even as he enjoys the support of Miriam Adelson, Trump seems focused on a quick deal, as opposed to some sort of longer-term comprehensive framework.
Meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on July 25 at his privatized State Department, Mar-a-Lago, Trump warned that under the current administration, the combat could escalate into “World War Three.” That’s unacceptable, he said, nodding to Netanyahu, “I want him to finish up and get it done quickly.”
So what does “quickly” mean? Nothing happens quickly unless it’s simple, and the Middle East isn’t simple. Almost certainly, it means a ceasefire. That would suggest that Hamas is still empowered (albeit much weakened), the hostages’ fate is undetermined, and future plans for Gaza unresolved. Netanyahu might not like it, but Trump is no fan of him, and most Israelis, and American Zionists, would be quietly relieved to see the fighting stopped. In other words, a ceasefire would not be fully satisfactory to anyone, but it is a deal, offering at least the hope of jaw-jaw, not war-war.
Trump is bringing the same bottom-line mindset to Ukraine. Last year he vowed, “I will have the deal done in one day. One day.” Once again, done-in-one-day deals do not allow for much detail; they suggest freezing in situ.
Just on July 19, in the wake of the attempt on his life, Trump said, “I appreciate President Zelenskyy for reaching out because I, as your next President of the United States, will bring peace to the world and end the war that has cost so many lives and devastated countless innocent families.”
No invocation of right and wrong, no discussion of international law, no declaration about the free world. No words or stipulations that would get in the way of making a deal.
To be sure, plenty of presidents have prided themselves on their personal negotiating skills. Yet Trump is different: His unique background aside, probably no president has had a more adversarial relationship with the federal government. On the campaign stump, Trump says, “We will demolish the deep state.” Loud cheers follow.
Which bodes poorly, of course, for the influence of Foreign Service officers in a Trump 47 administration. It also explains why there’s so much Trumpy energy in revamping the entire federal edifice. And that was before the Secret Service debacle in Butler, PA, which has led some prominent Trump allies to suspect that the “regime” wants Trump dead.
Could the next President Trump pull off a profound perestroika? A radical restructuring? The answer could depend on Trump’s dealmaking skills, as he defines them—and he’s undoubtedly up for the challenge.
As for the rest of us, it does seem that the federal government has gone kludgy, perhaps because it’s been overrun by woke i(DEI)ology. If so, the citizenry might welcome new sluiceways for new talent, using new tools to solve problems and seize opportunities.
So on domestic policy, too, Trump will be looking for new kinds of deals, beyond the metes and bounds of the presidency and precedent. Before Trump, presidents generally invoked macroeconomic theory (free trade) to hide from microeconomic consequences (workers losing their jobs). Heedless of economic cant, the can-do Trump, even before being inaugurated, traveled to Indiana in December 2016 to personally bargain with Carrier to keep its factory in Indiana. Trump was acting like an economic development czar—and people loved it.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, that Palmetto State menschenkenner, said of Trump in 2019, “The one thing about the president that I hope senators understand is he listens, he wants to be successful and he is not an ideologue.” Here at The American Conservative, this author has applied, to Trump, the term “popularist.”
Whatever’s in a name, Trump has dramatically reshaped the Republican Party’s platform position on abortion, IVF, gay marriage, and TikTok. Might the party switch back someday? Perhaps. But that’ll be someone else’s deal.
Yet Trump is hardly moving to the mushy middle. Putting on his businessman hat, he said in Milwaukee, “We are a nation that has the opportunity to make an absolute fortune with its energy.” After praising oil as “liquid gold,” he announced Establishment-defying policy: “We will be energy dominant and supply not only ourselves, but we will supply the rest of the world. With numbers that nobody has ever seen and we will reduce our debt, $36 trillion.”
To some, that’s an exciting prospect, moving from energy independence, to dominance, to abundance; paying down the debt and cutting taxes.
But how will this drill, baby, drill approach play in the parts of the country that are enviro green, and partisan blue?
Perhaps better than expected, as Big Tech grapples with the reality that all its AI data centers are the power-hungry equivalents of steel mills. If carbon-energy production could be coupled with carbon capture, thereby keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere, it’s possible to envision a “grand carbon bargAIn,” in which red-state energy juices blue-state brains.
Until the last year or two, many would have questioned Trump’s ability to actually do a deal with Big Tech, even if it’s demonstrably a win-win. The personal and cultural clefts were seen as just too wide.
Then came Elon Musk, to remind us that one tycoon can build a bridge, or at least cave in the chasm.
The foreign-born Musk can never be president, at least not of the U.S. Yet he has all the brilliance, and the ebullience, of a world-historical inflection-pointer. His company, SpaceX, has been so successful that even the New York Times gives his Martian musings fangirl treatment. Could there really be, as Musk prophesies, a million people living on Mars in 20 years? The mere prospect of it validates Trumpian exuberance.
In the meantime, Musk has bought Twitter, now X. Despite the left’s best efforts against it, X has survived and thrived; it has supplanted Fox News as the place where conservatives convene. Musk himself has endorsed Trump and now X-es out supportive memes.
No wonder Trump likes him. He recently dubbed SpaceX “The coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Channeling libertarian sci-fi legend Robert Heinlein, Trump asked, “How long would it take government to come up with that one?”
Then the elder mogul added, “We have to make life good for our smart people, and he’s as smart as you get.” We might pause over these words, as they speak to a shift in the zeitgeist, from “diversity is our strength,” to “intelligence is our strength.”
Indeed, Trump is taking America beyond the Coolidgean Republican dictum, “The business of America is business.” Already, we are living in a time where the brainiest are rewarded, bigly, where the most valuable inputs are IQ, adrenalin, and caffeine. Nerds have proven, with a vengeance, that if they can conjure up a good idea, capital will come. The result can be everything from Tesla to Grok, Starlink to Neuralink—and the list continues.
Nobody thinks of Trump as a techie, but he is demonstrably open to new tech ideas, especially if there’s many to be made. To wit, his openness to a Manhattan Project for AI.
In that same go-get-‘em spirit, on July 27, Trump spoke in Nashville to a Bitcoin convention. He joined the cryptopians in lambasting Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Bitcoiner’s bête noire, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler. If Trump wins, Gensler will be gone (as chair). Who will replace him? What will be the political, financial, and technological implications of Trump 47 crypt-policies? Answering these questions will make for a dealpalooza.
This is the future Trump offers: A future of deals, technologies, and hedge funds, transcending the familiar nine dots of politics and political science. A vision that extends from Planet Earth to Planet Musk.
Some might ask: Is there a role for government here? Sure there is. In fact, this author has written a book on this very topic, recalling the ways in which government has accelerated technologies, even as it safeguarded both plutocrats and proletarians. It’s Hamiltonian developmentalism, as well as Jeffersonian decentralization. We can have both: These days, capital markets are so nimble, they had no trouble following Musk, for example, as he decamped from blue California to red Texas.
But is this what the American people want? We’ll know in about three months. But even if Trump loses, the overall trend toward tech-tycoonery is unstoppable—these are thin times for Marxists, Luddite de-growthers, and, most recently, diversitarians.
Trump himself already knows his answer. As he said four decades ago, “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.”
Trump has never feared success, and he has grabbed for every advantage. Having persevered through stormy times, he’s confident that America wants more Art of the Deal.
The post Trump’s Art of the Deal Is Back, Baby appeared first on The American Conservative.
