Trump Had the Art of the Deal Now Democrats Say Their Economic Agenda

May 03, 2022 Post a Comment

The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump's bizarre 1987 book, wants yous to call up it'due south a guide to, well, "the fine art of the deal." That if you read information technology, y'all will learn the secrets of Trump'south success.

The reality is pretty different. The book spends most 20 pages explaining Trump's principles of dealmaking; the other 364 pages are devoted to a sort of autobiography of Trump's cocky-described greatest "deals." You don't learn a whole lot most how to succeed in business concern — but yous do learn a lot near Donald Trump.

Of all the books Trump has published — a surprising number for a man who says he doesn't have the fourth dimension to read books —The Art of the Deal is the most famous for a reason. In it, Trump reveals a lot about how he thinks nigh the globe. At times, it feels nigh like a Trump Rosetta stone: a guide for deciphering even the weirdest things Trump has done in this campaign bike.

What y'all learn about Trump from reading The Art of the Deal is that he doesn't run across deals every bit business transactions so much as measures of one's success at life. If that'southward the case, so you're justified in doing anything — anything — to make sure you come out on top.

This all stems from a key Trump conventionalities: Life is a contest for condition, which you win by having the best stuff and the all-time people admiring you. Money helps, to be sure, just getting a lot of greenbacks isn't enough. You need to be recognized every bit ane of the greatest at what you do, with the greatest things and best life, to have actually succeeded.

Some people volition detest you, and that's fine, if it'southward the "losers" doing the hating. Some hate, in fact, is even desirable — and then long every bit information technology helps you make deals that help you climb the world'southward status ladder.

And looking dorsum on what he wrote then, we can see at present that running for president isn't near ideology or policy for Trump. It'south near winning the ultimate status competition.

Life is a game, and deals are the scoreboard

Trump at an *Fine art of the Deal* book party.

The Art of the Deal was first published in 1987, and information technology covers the first stage of Trump's life, from birth his then-nowadays. It walks you through his "humble" ancestry in Brooklyn, his "first bargain" at Swifton Village in Cincinnati, and his greatest hits, like the construction of Trump Belfry in Manhattan.

In Trump's telling, his life is a history of unbroken successes. The experience of reading The Art of the Bargain is a chip like that of reading North Korean propaganda, if Kim Jong-Un were obsessed with tax abatements and casino profit margins.

The title, yous apace learn after reading the book, is really intended to be read more literally than a simple how-to guide: Trump sees deals as a kind of fine art. His life is a creative enterprise of dealmaking, about joy and cocky-expression rather than making money. He makes that clear from the book's very first paragraph:

I don't do it for the coin. I've got enough, much more I'll ever need. I do it to practice information technology. Deals are my art course. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferable large deals. That'southward how I go my kicks.

His disinterest in accumulating coin for its own sake actually seems genuine. What Trump is concerned about, information technology's clear, is status.

While his male parent was a hard-knock guy from Brooklyn, he wants to exist a powerful, respected Manhattan dealmaker — with the "best" of everything, from cars to apartments to wives. The bespeak of his business endeavors wasn't to make coin; it was, as he puts it, to be known equally "more than Fred Trump's son." He's a child of privilege, who inherited assets worth roughly $xl million from his father, but he wanted to make his own name.

"I learned very early on on that I didn't want to be in the business organization my father was in," Trump writes. "He did very well building rent-controlled and rent-stabilized housing in Queens and Brooklyn, simply information technology was a tough manner to brand a buck. I wanted to try something grander, more glamorous, and more heady."

That, for Trump, was Manhattan. He sees the world every bit full of hierarchies: Manhattan is the nigh important and famous identify in the world, and then he had to be there. Once he moved there, he almost immediately tried to bring together Studio 54, because it was "the hottest club in the metropolis and possibly the about exclusive." In one case ensconced in Manhattan society, he tried to make sure it would never forget him — by building huge buildings and ownership the "classiest" stuff.

People are judged similarly, with their appearances and status symbols marker them as worthwhile. Studio 54 was so impressive because "it was the sort of place where you lot were likely to encounter a wealthy seventy-v-year-old guy walk in with 3 blondes from Sweden." To Trump, success is ever demonstrated outwardly — information technology'due south defined as the ability to prove off in a way that marks y'all as 1 of life's victors.

"I wasn't satisfied just to earn a good living," he writes. "I was looking to brand a statement. I was out to build something monumental — something worth a big effort."

Money, then, isn't important unless information technology helps buy status; it's a tangible way of showing that Trump is succeeding. "Money was never a big motivation for me, except for keeping score," he writes. "The real excitement is playing the game."

Hence why, in 1987, Trump bought a 727 jumbo liner, a plane designed to fit 200 people, for his personal utilise. He admits information technology was an absurd matter to purchase — "it was a fiddling more plane than I needed" — but it was showy ("I don't believe in that location is any other private airplane in the sky comparable to this ane"). Moreover, the company that was selling information technology was having financial trouble, so he could haggle for it and get a good price. "I find it difficult to resist a skillful deal when the opportunity presents itself," Trump writes.

In that location's a crucial element of struggle to his idea of status, as his metaphor of "playing the game" suggests. Status isn't something that everyone tin can share; ultimately, someone gets to own the "best" belongings or the "most beautiful" tower.

"In the end, you're measured not past how much you undertake," Trump writes, "simply what you accomplish."

Trump's presidential bid has always seemed kind of baffling to people. Information technology'south hard to understand why someone with seemingly no knowledge about public policy, or involvement in politics, is trying so difficult to obtain a job so historically drenched in those things.

But after reading The Art of the Deal, I think I get it. The presidential election is "the next battle" — now that he'due south conquered existent estate and television, the next mode to make his marker is in politics.

I think Trump sees the presidency as the ultimate status symbol, and winning an American election the world's toughest deal to close. And if he wins, there's a whole new set of challenges for him, an even bigger phase on which he can accumulate the most stuff and thus prove himself to be the all-time.

How Trump rationalizes his relationship with the truth

One time you start seeing the presidency as Trump'south biggest bargain, the most tangible proof of his success at life, a lot of the way his campaign is run makes sense. According to PolitiFact editor Angie Holan, who assesses whether politicians are telling the truth for a living, Trump's "record on truth and accurateness is astonishingly poor."

And so why, precisely, does Trump lie and then much? In The Fine art of the Bargain, he tells us he will practice whatever he can to close a bargain — the ends justify the one-half-truth ways. Ethics kind of falls past the wayside; the purpose of life is winning, not following the rules. "I'm the first to admit that I'm very competitive and that I'll do most anything inside legal bounds to win," he writes.

That includes dishonesty. "A little hyperbole never hurts," he writes. "People desire to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. Information technology's an innocent course of exaggeration — and a very constructive form of promotion."

And going across "a trivial hyperbole" has served Trump well. In 1982, he describes how he was trying to go the Holiday Inn corporation to become in as his partner on his first Atlantic City casino. Earlier Vacation's board members would corroborate the bargain, they wanted to encounter the site where Trump planned to build information technology.

Trump was worried that the board would turn him down, equally they "had yet to practise much work" on edifice the casino. Then he asked his construction crew to circular upwards "every bulldozer and dump truck he could possibly find" and literally pretend to piece of work for as long every bit the lath was on site:

I wanted him to transform my two acres of almost vacant property into the virtually active structure site in the history of the world. What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn't important, I said, so long as they did a lot of it. If they got some bodily work achieved, all the better, simply if necessary he should have the bulldozers dig upwardly dirt from one side of the site and dump it on the other.

Trump recalls one board fellow member asking why "that guy over there is merely filling up that hole, which he just dug."

In Trump's optics, it worked. "The board walked away from the site absolutely convinced it was the perfect selection," he writes. "In reality, I wasn't that far along, but I did everything I could, brusk of going to work at the site myself, to assure them that my casino was practically finished. My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe."

This is why Trump lies then much nearly his policies. He doesn't mind misleading people if it helps him become what he wants — in fact, he believes disarming others that reality is what he says is a critical part of his success.

He's disarming the American public that "it'southward in their interest to make the deal" — even if his campaign doesn't actually have something they need.

How Trump manipulates the media for profit

Many of the about (in)famous moments of Trump'due south campaign — his feud with Megyn Kelly, his mocking of a disabled reporter, his former campaign manager manhandling then-Breitbart writer Michelle Fields — involve Trump's relationship with the media. An assay of Trump's Twitter account by my colleague Zachary Crockett institute that Trump tweets about the media 3.5 times as much as he tweets about actual policy issues.

There's a reason for that. Throughout The Fine art of the Bargain, Trump constantly talks about reporters and critics: the ones he similar, the ones he hates, and the ones who helped his business. For him, media defines reality — and thus who has leverage. He literally attributes one of his most significant successes to the media's influence: New York'south Trump Belfry.

In 1979, earlier construction began, the Donald's planned crown precious stone in Manhattan was in trouble. He was in the midst of a tough battle in the city planning commission, with anti-overbuilding activists deeply opposed to his plans to erect a new skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. Ultimately, Trump won — and he credits the New York Times.

"Looking dorsum," he writes, "perhaps no 1 had a more powerful influence than Ada Louise Huxtable, then the chief architecture critic of the New York Times."

During the fight, Trump courted Huxtable, giving her an exclusive early view of the Trump Tower plans. The review concluded up being a pretty negative review of New York zoning laws, with a few compliments thrown in. But the headline — "A New York blockbuster of superior design" — was good enough to convince the commission to approve the program, Trump believes. "That headline probably did more for my zoning than whatever unmarried thing I e'er said or did," he writes.

The Times'due south subsequent coverage of Trump Belfry was far from positive. In 1980, during the edifice'south construction, Trump ordered his coiffure to demolish some art deco sculptures that the site's previous owners had installed. The Times's editorial board responded with outrage: "Plain large buildings do non make big human beings, nor do big deals make fine art experts."

According to Trump, the widespread anger about the sculpture demolitions didn't actually injure him. "Even though the publicity was well-nigh entirely negative," he writes, information technology "drew a tremendous amount of attending to Trump Tower. About immediately we saw an upsurge in the sales of apartments."

From this experience, Trump learned that controversy is skilful for business, as he writes in one of The Art of the Deal'southward almost revealing passages:

I'm not maxim that's a adept thing, and in truth information technology probably says something perverse about the civilization nosotros alive in. Simply I'k a man of affairs, and I learned a lesson from that feel: skilful publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

This, as you tin can meet, has obvious application to his presidential campaign. Trump doesn't mind that the press savages him for wanting to ban Muslims from entering America or for calling Mexicans rapists. He uses the controversy to concenter attention, and thus reach the audience that finds his bulletin attractive. His entrada is an exercise in a lesson most media manipulation he learned more than than 35 years ago.

"I'chiliad going to suck all the oxygen out of the room," he reportedly told a political consultant before his campaign began. "I know how to work the media in a mode that they will never take the lights off of me."

What you have to understand about Trump's faith in the power of the media is that it is near absolute. Trump believes that perception makes reality, and that the media is what determines the earth'due south perceptions today.

Take, for case, the idea of "location" in real estate. To most people, this ways your physical location — homes in desirable neighborhoods are worth more than than those in slums. But for Trump, location is socially constructed — a location is valuable if people see it as such, which may not have a lot to do with the physical reality of the location.

"You lot don't necessarily need the best location. What y'all demand is the all-time deal," he writes. "Just every bit you can create leverage, yous can heighten a location, through promotion and through psychology."

In selling Trump Tower units, he explains, "we positioned ourselves equally the only identify for a certain kind of very wealthy person to alive — the hottest ticket in town. We were selling fantasy." The heavy media coverage created that fantasy, the mere fact of the attention positioning Trump Belfry as "something nearly larger than life," an "event" equally much as an actual building.

The thought is, in its own Trumpish way, a bit like the one developed by the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In a series of 3 essays chosen The Gulf State of war Did Non Accept Place, Baudrillard argued that that the significance of the Gulf War was not principally determined by the concrete effects of dropping bombs, but rather past the way warfare was represented in mass media. That's because in a world of 24/7 news coverage, the mode things are represented is more important in shaping their effects than the reality of what actually happens.

"Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual," Baudrillard writes. "We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television receiver is the universal mirror, to the ending of the real."

Trump has, in an instinctive mode, taken Baudrillard'due south theory to centre. His entire campaign for the presidency is premised on the thought that he tin sell himself equally "larger than life," that asserting that he has the gravitas necessary to become president will really bequeath it on him. And the printing, he believes, are his unwitting accomplices — helping him even every bit they attack him.

Why Trump can't seem to talk about policy

One of Trump's strangest features as a candidate is that he doesn't seem to like talking much nigh policy. His answers to policy questions often involve vague nonsense.

Read i fashion, this is just simple ignorance: Trump literally doesn't sympathize the issues in question. When he claims he has a "foolproof way of winning the state of war with ISIS" just claims he won't release it considering "I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how" he'll beat them, that'due south probably what it is. I seriously doubt he has a secret plan that would defeat ISIS merely he merely won't tell anyone. Trump loves to brag.

But The Art of t he Bargain suggests a different respond, rooted in what Trump means when he says he wants to hire "the best people." In the context of the volume, that comes across not as ignorance but as office of a life philosophy. He sees his bid for the presidency equally his life's biggest deal, and is just executing on the strategy he'due south used to great success in business.

In the book, as in life, Trump is always talking nearly working with the "best" people. "I have a very elementary rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors," he writes. "That's how you build a first-form operation."

This arroyo has helped him set regime projects in the past (or, at least, he thinks it has). In 1986, he took over construction on the Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park. The city had been building it for six years and had gone $12 1000000 over upkeep without really accomplishing anything.

The issue, Trump writes, was bureaucracy and leadership. "You lot tin can become any job done through sheer force of will — and knowing what y'all're talking about," he writes. "Nigh no one in the metropolis government knows anything most structure. Worst of all, no one in the urban center government bureaucracy is held accountable for failure."

So when Trump swooped in, he pushed the regime out of the fashion — and applied his patented direction strategy.

"Since I myself knew admittedly nothing about edifice rinks, I set out to find the all-time skating-rink builder I could," Trump writes. He looked to Canada, because "ice skating is to Canadians what baseball game is to Americans." (Trump has a deep faith in stereotypes.) He phoned effectually and ended upward hiring Cimco, a Toronto-based company that had built the Montreal Canadiens' rink.

Cimco did the job well, and the rink was unveiled past November of that year. When it was done, the city asked Trump to manage information technology. How? "Again, I just looked for the all-time rink managers available," Trump writes. "The reply I came upwards with was Water ice Capades [and] they've done an impeccable task with Wollman Rink."

This is a running theme throughout the book: When Trump gets sued, he hires the "all-time" lawyers. When his casinos are struggling, he hires the "best" managers from other companies.

The signal is that he sees "hiring the best people" as a legitimate solution to bug with his deals. While most politicians call back they themselves are supposed to come up with policy solutions to problems, Trump actually thinks that "rent the all-time people" is itself a policy solution.

This isn't an original observation. Scott Alexander, the fantabulous writer behind SlateStarCodex, had a similar thought after reading The Fine art of the Deal.

"This thing virtually hiring the all-time people, for example, seems almost similar an obsession in the book," Alexander writes. "When he says that he's going to solve Medicare by hiring cracking managers and knowing all the right people, I don't think this is some vapid way of avoiding the question. I call back it's the honest output of a mind that works very differently from mine."

But there's an important deviation between what Trump means when he says "the all-time people" and what nigh people recall he ways. For Trump, "best" doesn't necessarily mean the about qualified, talented, or honest: it ways the person whose services well-nigh benefit Trump, and who volition be the virtually loyal to him personally.

This approach dates all the manner back to the first of his career, in 1964. Back then, Trump was in college, helping his father manage a i,200-flat evolution called Swifton Hamlet in Cincinnati. Trump and his father were having trouble finding someone to manage the unit, going through director subsequently manager — until they stumbled upon a man named Irving.

Irving, Trump admits openly, was a con man — and kind of an asshole. In one visit to a tenant's unit, Irving, co-ordinate to Trump, instructed a x-yr-sometime daughter to "tell your father to pay his fucking rent or I'm going to knock his ass off." Afterward, he shamelessly flirted with the girl's (married) mother.

When the incensed married man stormed into the management office, Irving threatened to fight him. "I'll impale you. I'll destroy y'all. These hands are lethal weapons, they're registered with the police department," he spat.

Co-ordinate to Irving's employees, he stole a small-scale fund they had all chipped in on together — designed to pay for funerals. Irving stole a lot more from Trump; $fifty,000 a twelvemonth, Trump guesses.

A normal person would have fired Irving. Trump came to rely on him. Irving, co-ordinate to Trump, was "a fabulous human," an "amazing managing director," and "ane of the greatest bullshit artists I've ever met." Trump came to rely on the old man so much, in fact, that he "began spending less and less time" at Swifton Hamlet "once Irving had information technology running so well."

Trump doesn't care at all that Irving was verbally calumniating, or even that he stole from employees. He simply cares that Irving helped him plow a turn a profit. Trump doesn't hide this avariciousness — in fact, he brags virtually it. In his telling, his ability to look past a manager making unwanted sexual advances on a tenant is a sign of his own brilliant business instincts. All that matters to him is that he turn a turn a profit — that Swifton Hamlet finish up being, in his parlance, a "good deal."

That'southward worth keeping in mind today, given that Trump seems to see his bid for the presidency every bit just another bargain. He's got the same motivation — a hunt for status — and the same principles — dispense perceptions, hire the "best" people — that he had during his rise to prominence in real manor. This seems bizarre to united states, because nosotros aren't used to politicians who act like garish existent estate moguls and appoint evidently unqualified people as their top lieutenants.

Just if yous read The Art of the Deal, the mystery around Trump collapses. He is exactly who he says he is.