Trump and the Art of Presidential Deal Making

Abstract

Donald Trump’s professional background is unique among presidents. I glean basic principles of negotiation from his professional life, presented largely in his book The Art of the Deal, but also other writing, media interviews, and social media posts. I argue the success of his approach is dependent for the most part upon three factors: the nature of his counterpart, the expected frequency of future deals with this counterpart, and the position of the status quo and reversion points in the negotiation. In the bargaining contexts I present, Trump’s approach, I hypothesize, is most likely to bring about success—a deal—in foreign policy and least likely in regular lawmaking. I find some evidence consistent with this. The study illustrates scholars should do more to understand how pre-tenure careers affect presidential behavior.

Acknowledgments

I thank Val Mera, Lorcan Neill, and Jacob Trubey for help with research and John Hood, anonymous reviewers, and anonymous questioners for comments on talks on which this paper is based. I thank Jonathan Lewallen and Scott Newsome for additional suggestions on how to improve the paper. I presented an earlier version to the 2021 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.

Disclosure statement

The author has no financial support or relationships that may pose a conflict of interest to report.

Notes

1 This is not the first study to examine the effect of Trump’s unique background on his behavior as president. Pfiffner (2021) argues that because Trump had no experience working in government, the military, or large organizations, he was unfamiliar with the norms that typically guide and restrain the actions of presidents.

2 Political scientists have largely neglected this topic. Perhaps this is because there is not a great deal of variance in presidents’ careers before they enter the White House. The Green and Pederson (1985) study of presidents who were lawyers is an exception.

3 There have been cursory observations of Trump’s approach to deal making, many of which borrow from The Art of the Deal. Written largely by journalists, they tend to be witheringly critical (see, for example, Bump (2017) and Hirsh (2019)). Social scientists and practitioners have written more balanced and broader accounts of Trump’s decision-making style (Edwards 2017; Fitzsimmons, 2022; Hendrix 2018; Haberman 2022; Kogan 2019). Kogan (2019) believes Trump sees four roles for himself in his collective writing, those of “observer”, “performer”, “controller”, and “disrupter”. He also uses just one case to apply his framework, Trump’s dealings with North Korea. Edwards (2017) examines Trump’s deal making only with Congress and largely in the context of regular lawmaking.

4 Schwartz and the book’s publisher claim Trump played little to no role in the writing of the book. Several individuals mentioned argue that parts are inaccurate. Trump has the credit, however, and clearly endorsed it. Prior to becoming president, he repeatedly and publicly embraced it and the approach to deal-making it describes. Biographer Gwenda Blair (2001) argues the book captures Trump’s approach to negotiation very well.

5 Trump’s personality and pre-tenure experiences certainly had effects on other areas of his presidency, such as his decision-making (Mayer 2021) and relationship with the bureaucracy (Pfiffner 2021).

6 Mayer (2021) has presented a similar assessment of Trump’s management style which he calls “chaotic” and devoid of strategy. Trump operated, Mayer (2021) states, a “Random Walk Presidency”.

7 The literature tends to see a president’s accomplishments—policy or not—as important in the aggregate. The public assesses a holistic record at election time. But there is some research that believes the public views the presidential record as having discrete components that can be added to—and plausibly subtracted from—across the course of the term (Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts 2001; Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002; Cavari 2019).

8 There are several datasets of Trump Twitter archives. They include http://trumptweettrack.com, http://www.thetrumparchive.com, and https://factba.se.

9 There is, of course, a huge literature on how presidents approach the act of bargaining with other politicians and political institutions. For some of the most influential and important work, see: Epstein and O’Halloran (1999), Kiewiet and McCubbins (1988), and Neustadt (1990).

10 This is something that is prohibitively difficult to measure in any quantitative way. However, several political scientists see Trump and populism particularly as contributing to what they call the “personalization” of politics—that is, making leaders themselves of central importance at the expense of institutions like parties and government offices (Rahat and Henig 2018).

11 George H.W. Bush seems a good example of this. Bush was a “grand strategist” of the type who thought in terms of countries and their place in the world rather than leaders who could act as agents on their behalf (Engel 2021).

12 To scholars of international relations, this is an important part of negotiations. The theory is taken largely from the work of sociologist Erving Goffman (1959), who saw the importance of “impression management” in interactions and how adversarial participants in bargaining should provide avenues for counterparts to reenter the process in a similar or even more favorable position so that the negotiation may continue and the potentially high costs of breakdown averted.

13 Trump-style populism and its antagonism to expertise goes back deep into American history, as Hofstadter (1963) explains.

14 Trump, of course, did not view things quite this way. The “Deep State” as he called it, was largely autonomous from his control (Skowronek, Dearborn, and King 2021).

15 I select the cases for the foreign policy analysis from among the Council on Foreign Relations’ “Trump Foreign Policy Moments.” (see: https://www.cfr.org/timeline/trumps-foreign-policy-moments). The cases analyzed in the regular lawmaking section from Edwards’s (2021, 177-303) book on Trump and the section on Congress.

16 The legislation presented an opportunity to close a challenging deal. In the context of my understanding of Trump’s approach to deal making his behavior is therefore puzzling.

17 For more on the public’s views on Obamacare over time, see Kaiser Family Foundation’s comprehensive data at: https://www.kff.org/interactive/kff-health-tracking-poll-the-publics-views-on-the-aca.

18 Bump (2017) undertook a very entertaining analysis of Trump’s approach during the defeat of the ACA repeal in a Washington Post blog. See also Edwards (2017, 480-91) on Trump and the effort to overturn ACA.

19 In the 115th Congress, Trump took positions on 8.7 percent of the votes that did not concern nominations.

20 Even with a generous definition of foreign policy—to include matters of trade, defense and national security, immigration, and general relations with other nations—I identify just 54 of Trump’s orders that way.

21 In 2019, the administration did secure agreements with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala requiring migrants to seek protection in these countries before coming to the United States. I do not include these possible foreign policy deals in my analysis.

22 In a seminal article, Putnam (1988) presents presidential bargaining with other countries as a “two-level game” where the agreement is constrained by domestic factors, but the president has significant latitude within the set of deals that domestic constituents are willing to accept.

23 Most of the influential Washington-based think tanks—the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, Cato Institute—believed USMCA was not much different from NAFTA and the country’s trade policy was worse for having undertaken the new agreement.

24 For more on Trump and China, see Larson (2021).

25 For more on Trump’s approach to North Korea as a deal to be made, see Delury (2017).

26 For more on Trump on the Paris Climate Accords and Iran Nuclear Deal, see Fitzsimmons (2022).

27 Congress can also pass an optional reconciliation bill governing changes to tax policy and entitlement programs. As a practical matter, the process created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act in 1974 has not really been followed since the 1990s. We rarely have reconciliation bills these days and, particularly when different parties control the chambers, either the House or Senate refuses to pass a concurrent resolution. We still need appropriations to fund the government. Rather than passed as twelve stand-alone bills, however, these are frequently enacted in omnibus form or as continuing resolutions that extend spending at the previous year’s levels.