Trump’s Art of the Not-Quite-Deal
The president has offered frameworks, pledges, handshakes and threats — a style that carries growing legal, economic and diplomatic risks.
Illustration: Derek Abella for Bloomberg
Donald Trump became a celebrity, and then a two-time president, on the strength of his reputation as a dealmaker. “Deals are my art form,” he boasts in his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.”
By Trump’s reckoning, he’s blazed through the first year of his second term by pumping out deals at such a furious clip that the rest of us can only marvel in amazement. “I’ve made 200 deals,” he told TIME in April, a mere three months into his term. A month later, the White House credited him with “locking in over $2 trillion in great deals.” Over the summer, Trump touted a veritable deal-of-a-lifetime with Japan that will, in his telling, shower the US with cash. “We’re taking in $550 billion,” Trump claimed on CNBC. “That’s like a signing bonus that a baseball player would get.”