Worst negotiator ever
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/worst-negotiator-ever/
One of the interesting things about Trump is that his statements are so often the exact opposite of reality. When he says he’s really smart, or no one respects women more than him, or that press criticism is fake news, the truth is almost always the precise opposite. Now we find out that not only is Trump not a great negotiator, he might be the single worst negotiator ever to serve as President of the United States.
We’ve seen his inability to get a Republican House and Senate to replace Obamacare. His inability to get them to put up money for a border wall, even though in other areas Congress has been spending money like a drunken sailor. (Nor has he been able to get Mexico to pay for the wall, as he promised.) Now
this:
When he emerged from his summit with Kim Jong Un last month, President Trump triumphantly declared that North Korea no longer posed a
nuclear threat and that one of the world’s most intractable geopolitical crises had been https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-gaggle/
But in the days and weeks since then, U.S. negotiators have faced stiff resistance from a North Korean team practiced in the art of delay and obfuscation.
Diplomats say the North Koreans have canceled follow-up meetings, demanded more money and failed to maintain basic communications, even as the once-isolated regime’s engagements with China and South Korea flourish. . . .
The lack of immediate progress, though predicted by many analysts, has frustrated the president, who has fumed at his aides in private even as he publicly hails the success of the negotiations.
N. Korea is toying with us, because they knows that Trump’s eager for an agreement. Any agreement.
When Trump showed an almost pathetic eagerness to meet with Kim, he put the US in a very weak negotiating position. The North Koreans are not dumb; they know that Trump’s only goal is personal success—ideology is secondary. If Obama had done a nuclear agreement with North Korea and put sanctions on Iran, then Trump would have torn up the Korea agreement and started cozying up to the mullahs. Trump’s only goal is to do the opposite of Obama, to one up him. But that makes it hard for people in the Trump administration, some of whom (like Mike Pompeo) actually do have ideological beliefs.
It’s actually good that Trump is so bad at negotiating. Because he has such bad instincts on policy questions, it’s better if he gets nothing done. That’s not to say he won’t occasionally luck into a successful policy, like the recent corporate tax cut (something all our competitors did years ago—Obama’s biggest failure was to not see the need.) But Trump will usually be wrong.
In his recent negotiation with Juncker, the EU leader
took him to the cleaners. The
Independent explains how:
European Commission chief
Jean-Claude Juncker reportedly used brightly coloured flash cards to explain international trade to US president
Donald Trump.
The pair met at the White House earlier this week for trade negotiations and Mr Juncker used cards with simple language and easy-to-understand explanations, according to a senior EU official who was at the meeting and spoke to the
Wall Street Journal.
Trump agreed to back off on a trade war with the EU in exchange for meaningless promises.
But that’s really good news.
Trump has lots of bad qualities; stupidity, extreme egotism, corruption, dishonesty, cruelty, incompetence, bad taste, bigotry, no sense of humor, cowardice, I could go on and on. He has no good qualities, unless one views a talent for conning voters to be a positive attribute. But his complete lack of negotiating skills turns out to be a plus for America, even if it’s just one more of his seemingly endless bad qualities.
PS. Brightly colored flash cards? How can you not love that story?