PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: WORST EVER “DEAL MAKING PRESIDENT”

…This is apparently what the president wants as his Border Wall

Trump’s so called negotiating skills are not the right fit for any nation’s president

President Trump, one of the worst deal makers as a US President, his demand for a wall across most of the southern Mexico border has been mocked as a “medieval” idea.

Responding to the president’s prime-time speech from the Oval Office, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) tweeted, “We are not paying a $5 billion ransom note for your medieval border wall.” A day later, Trump responded with: “Democrats say it’s a medieval solution, a wall. It’s true, because it worked then, and it works even better now.”

Since then, Trump’s association with a medieval wall seems to have stuck.  Walls for protection are generally straight from the Middle Ages.  Dana Milbank at The Post ran with that idea, speaking with several scholars of the Middle Ages.  Experts on siege warfare, about what the country would “really” need if it were planning to use a wall to repel those from the other side.

Calling the proposed 700 to 1,200 mile border wall “medieval” is deeply misleading because walls in the actual Middle Ages simply did not work the way Trump apparently thinks they did.  Trump’s wall would be a poor tool of defense, as medieval walls had more to do with just reassuring those who lived inside them than with dividing them from others on the other side.

Rome’s walls were breached numerous times.  In 410 A.D. by the Goths, by the Vandals in 455, by Muslim pirates in 846, by the Normans in 1084 and by the Holy Roman Empire in 1527.  The Crusades often involved scaling walls to take cities, from the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 A.D. to the infamous massacre of heretics at Beziers in southern France and in 1209 in the Islamic conquest of Acre in 1291.

In other words, the tall, multilayered medieval walls we so often envision, they often did not work.  Even the massive Theodsian Walls surrounding Constantinople were scaled and breached by Venetians and Franks in 1204.  They were then reduced to rubble by the gunpowder weapons of the Ottomans in 1453.

Cities successfully repelled sieges at times. But it is indeed critical to note that even in those circumstances, we are specifically talking about towns and cities. We are definitely not talking about miles of walls meant to separate peoples of one nation from another.

But borders, as a concept, were a much more nebulous thing in the Middle Ages than they are today. 

Even the sturdiest walls served a different purpose than what one might expect. An art historian at Yale, put it in a tweet, “Medieval city walls were not built to separate people of [different] ethnic or national identities. Gates were open during the day and closed at night. In other words, the walls were indeed a defense against any potential common threat, but the world inside those walls offered refuge for all who needed it. The gates were there not to keep them out, but to allow them in to safety.”

OK, now let’s talk about Trump being the worst deal-making president for getting his “Wall”.

...Another example of Trump's desire for a "Border Wall"

“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward,” writes President Trump in “The Art of the Deal,” the book of which he is so terribly proud. “ I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”

In other words, if Trump was writing a recipe for his Instant Pot Trump Cookbook, he would write: “Put together all of ingredients in a pot, then cook them until they taste fantastic. That’s how you make great food.”

This weekend made his Wall shut-down the longest government shutdown in US history.  The entire country is learning an awful truth: “Trump is a deal-maker of the worst kind, and we’re all paying the price for it.”

We don't yet know how the shutdown is going to be resolved, but we do know that Trump has bumbled his way through it with such incompetence that even his most ardent defenders have a hard time claiming that he has any idea what he's doing.

Let’s take it by the numbers:

First, he gave us a temporary bill to fund the government.  A bill that passed the Senate unanimously.  However, when the conservative radio hosts, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh criticized him for being weak, he quickly refused to sign any spending bill that didn’t have funding for a border Wall.  He then went on live television and told Democratic leaders, “I am proud to shut down the government. ... I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it,” this being on record, it thereby made his attempt to try and blame the shutdown on the Democrats highly comical, (and more material for the late night comics)

His lame attempts at "negotiating" are abysmal. He walked out of a meeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi when Pelosi said “no” to a wall.  There was no negotiation or an attempt at a compromise.  He then went on Twitter to lob juvenile insults at the two Democrats. These are an 11-year-old’s playground moves that won't get him any closer to making a deal.  However, it does give everyone some insight into where Trump is coming from.

As the reporters, Shannon Pettypiece and Margaret Talev have pointed out his dramatic walk-away exit as a negotiating tactic Trump has used for many years.

In his pre-political life, they report, “Trump was known to have done the same thing when a deal wasn’t going his way. He even walked out of a judge’s chambers during his divorce proceedings.” Like most of what Trump believes about deal-making, it’s based on the presumption that he’s the one with all the power.  He’s enough of a bully that he believes that those on the other side of the table will eventually just give him what he wants.

When Trump was a private citizen, that was often how it ended.  If he was negotiating with a vendor, probably a small-businessperson who was eager to do work for someone so famous, he could bully them into terms advantageous to him.  If they didn’t like it, he could find someone else to sell him the products for his buildings and hotels.  They also, probably didn’t realize that he would end up stiffing them with the bill.  It was all based on the idea that the other person needed him, more than he needed them.  Therefore, his aggression was the only tactic necessary.  If the other person didn’t agree, Trump might then just sue them causing expensive legal fees until they eventually gave in or went bankrupt.  

Sorry Donald, the United States won’t go bankrupt, but you are sticking the American public with the bill.

When Trump ran for president, he figured he could use these same sales techniques.  During the 2016 campaign, he said that the way to deal with China was to say, “Listen you mother f---ers, we’re going to tax you 25%.” Next thing you know, he expected that China would quake before his manly power and give us back all the manufacturing jobs that were lost over the past couple of decades.

Needless to say, that didn’t and isn’t going to happened.

One of the consequences of Trump’s simplistic view of negotiating is that he doesn’t know what to do when he’s faced with a situation where the other nation has just as much power as his.  Things such as yelling and walking out of the room do not make any of tem to knuckle under.

The truth that Trump still doesn’t grasp is that presidential negotiating is much more complicated than negotiating something like building a hotel or a brand licensing agreement.  It actually requires knowledge of often complex policy issues and a deep understanding of all the forces at play with the other side. And that might be where Trump’s failure is the most profound as he never personally gets involved with the details.

Trump shows no sign of believing he has to understand any of that.  You see it in his foreign policy, too: Trump thought that he could charm North Korea's Kim Jong Un into giving up nuclear weapons, but he didn't bother to understand what those weapons represent to Kim. In addition, why Kim might not be inclined to part with them.  The result is that the weapons are still there, and Trump's talk of winning a Nobel Peace Prize because he negotiated such a great deal now makes him look like the fool he is today.

Trump just doesn’t understand that unlike with his private business, as president he has to negotiate again and again with the same people.  As a businessman he could con someone out of his or her life savings or refuse to pay a bill, and it wouldn’t matter because there were always more suckers to be found. But as president, he has to negotiate with people who have learned that they can’t trust his word, and that he will make you a promise today, and he will break it tomorrow.

Even Trump’s own allies acknowledge that he can’t be trusted. “Democrats keep saying, ‘We don’t trust it until Trump will sign it,' '' said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “That’s not an unreasonable request.” “It’s always difficult,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), “when the person you’re negotiating with is someone who changes their mind.”

Yes, this is Trump’s situation, which is why the only real way out of this crisis is for Democrats and Republicans in Congress to stop negotiating with Trump entirely.  They should negotiate with each other, pass a bill to fund the government and put it on his desk.

He might veto it, but he probably won’t. Then he can proclaim that it was only his brilliant deal-making skill that led to a resolution, and the rest of us can then finally get on with our lives.

Unfortunately, until he’s gone, this is the so called “Great Deal Maker” we have to deal with today…..yes, it’s totally disgusting.

Copyright G. Ater 2019