Shortly after Donald Trump backed down on trade tariffs, pausing much (but not all) of his failing policy, the White House emphasized that the shift would be temporary. In fact, Peter Navarro, the president’s highly controversial trade adviser, said the move would open the door to exciting new opportunities that would unfold very quickly.
“We’re going to run 90 deals in 90 days,” Navarro told Fox Business a couple of weeks ago, adding that such a plan “is possible” in part because “the boss is going to be the chief negotiator.”
It was an odd claim, in part because crafting actual trade deals can take months, if not years, and the process invariably involves dozens of officials across federal agencies. Complicating matters, the president himself has said he’s not in a rush to make any trade deals, and he claimed to have less interest in striking deals than officials in other countries.
Worse still, there have been reports of late that foreign officials have struggled to understand what exactly the White House wants from the negotiations it ostensibly welcomed, and these officials aren’t even sure who’s in a position of authority within the administration.
As a result, there have been a grand total of zero new trade deals since Navarro’s “90 deals in 90 days” comment. As The New York Times reported, this is part of a broader pattern.
President Trump came into office promising to strike “big, beautiful” deals. He quickly opened a dizzying number of negotiations to, naming just a few of his aims, end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, bring peace to the Middle East and usher in dozens of trade deals in record time. … But so far, the goals of many of Mr. Trump’s negotiations have been unrealized, even those that he said would be accomplished in days or weeks.
For all the chest-thumping about the deals he’d reach — in Ukraine, in the Middle East, with China and other trading partners, et al. — the president’s list of second-term successes is, at least for now, blank.
One of the weirdest myths in contemporary politics is that Trump is a world-class dealmaker. This has never been true, and it’s certainly not true now. And yet, many act as if the myth were an undeniable fact of modern American life.
For example, the State Department’s Tammy Bruce told Fox Business last week, “President Trump is, as we know, the best dealmaker in the world.” Earlier this month, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made related on-air comments, telling Fox News that Trump’s deal-making abilities are “unlike anything I think any of us have ever seen.”
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer made similar comments last month, which followed related rhetoric from Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma and Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
I’m mindful of the fact that the public is certainly supposed to believe this, but has anyone seen any evidence at all that Trump has had any success as a political dealmaker?
As a candidate in 2016, Trump told Fox News, “The problem with Washington, they don’t make deals. It’s all gridlock. And then you have a president that signs executive orders because he can’t get anything done. I’ll get everybody together.” It was a familiar boast. Indeed, not long before launching his campaign in 2015, the Republican identified this as his greatest strength. “Deals are my art form,” Trump claimed. “Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” After the election, the White House bought into the hype. In 2019, then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “The president is, I think, the ultimate negotiator and dealmaker.” But the evidence of Trump actually succeeding on this front does not exist. There were literally zero instances in which he successfully brought Democratic and Republican leaders together and negotiated a major legislative breakthrough ahead of his 2020 defeat. Indeed, toward the end of his first term, Trump largely gave up on even trying to make deals with Congress, and in the opening months of his second term, we’ve seen more of the same. The Washington Post reported in August 2020, “The president who pitched himself to voters as the consummate negotiator and ultimate dealmaker has repeatedly found his strategies flummoxed by the complexities and pressures of Washington lawmaking.” This came on the heels of the Post’s Jackson Diehl explaining, in reference to Trump: “He’s not up to serious negotiation. He can’t be expected to seriously weigh costs and benefits, or make complex trade-offs. He’s good at bluster, hype and showy gestures, but little else. In short, he may be the worst presidential deal maker in modern history.” If recent history is any guide, the myth will persist — as will Trump’s record of failure.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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