Trump’s True Deal-Making Abilities, Revealed

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This is The Opinions, a show that brings you

a mix of voices from New York Times' opinion.

You've heard the news.

Here's what to make of it.

Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics.

Once again, with my fellow Times' opinion contributor,

E.J. Dion.

Always great to be with you.

And returning to join us, Times' opinion columnist, Carlos

Lazada.

Happy to be back.

Great to see you.

This was a week when a deadline came and went.

It was a deadline Donald Trump set in the war against Iran,

rather than resume attacks on Iranian targets,

Trump declared a continuation of the ceasefire

until in his words Iran's leaders and representatives

can come up with a unified proposal.

Well, not only did Trump keep military action on hold,

he also delayed Vice President Vance's departure

to take part in diplomatic action.

An Iranian spokesman declared Trump's extension

of the ceasefire to have no meaning, which

squares with news that two container ships

precised near the Strait of Hormuz

by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in Navy.

If you find this confusing, join the club.

We start very far from the straits here on the home front

with this question, has the war in Iran

and the economic shocks that it has brought?

Taken the measure of the self-proclaimed master artist

of the deal in the White House.

EJ, you go first.

Are we seeing the limits of Donald Trump's ability

to spin his way out of political trouble?

Indeed, I mean, the template for Trump's ability

to spin, to lie, to intimidate, to distract

from any problems was set when he said,

I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it,

at least with his supporters.

But it's very clear that there are some things that can't

be spun.

One is people's own perceptions of their own economic

circumstance.

Trump was elected with a promise on day one

to bring down prices and sent a strong message

that that was going to be a central purpose

of his administration.

And he's done, you could say exactly the opposite of that,

the tariffs, whatever their long-term effect will be,

clearly increased rather than decreased prices.

And now this war has increased prices for oil

and therefore, lots of other things.

And voters are noticing that.

And no matter what he says about affordability being

a word invented by his opponents, people see that.

And when you are, as ill-prepared for this war as Trump clearly

was, when you expect your enemy to fold instantly and win

as easily as he seemed to win as he won in Venezuela,

you are not prepared for what we face.

And when you're looking at these negotiation attempts,

it really underscores how this is the cliff notes

presidency that just doesn't take detail seriously.

When President Obama negotiated the deal with Iran,

there were all sorts of people there, including physicists,

like the energy secretary from my hometown, Ernie Moniz.

Here, you got a real estate guy, his son-in-law,

and the vice president.

And the last thing I want to say about what people are noticing

about the recklessness in this administration

is also connected to cruelty.

There was a really powerful piece in the Times this week

that I urge folks to read by Elizabeth B. Miller and Eileen

Sullivan about what the wreckage of USAID

means for the lives of people there

and not to mention for American interest in the world

and for vastly increasing the suffering

of the poorest people around the globe.

If you wanted to throw a hand grenade

at American respect and influence around the world,

you'd wreck USAID just like that.

And people are seeing all of these things.

Carlos?

One thing I would add, this whole notion of Trump

as the master deal maker, as a deal maker in chief,

it's all part of this long-running Trump mythology

that was part of the art of the deal,

part of the apprentice.

I think what we're seeing now very clearly

in the second term is the limits to his deal-making

promise, especially internationally.

You mentioned it was going to bring down prices on day one.

It was also going to end the Ukraine war in a day.

Remember, like this was something he said,

more than 50 times on a campaign trail.

His trade deals have been all over the map

in part because the tariff policy has been all over the map.

And the court has put limits on his ability to do that.

Sending JD Vance the first time around for a day

to negotiate is theater.

You can't conclude negotiations on such an array

of complicated issues in one day.

I agree, I don't think Trump has the attention

to detail the patience, frankly,

for sort of arduous negotiations that lead to a real deal.

I think he wants to say face.

He wants to say that whatever he gets

was better than the Obama deal,

and he wants to get out as soon as he can.

You wrote recently about a phrase that Trump has used

to describe progress in the war.

It's on schedule, or it's ahead of schedule.

Yes.

It's a remarkable thing.

He used it right away at the very beginning of the war

in early March.

He said to CNN that the war was a little ahead of schedule.

Then in mid-March, he said it was very far ahead of schedule.

And then in a cabinet meeting towards the end of the month,

he said it was extremely, really, a lot ahead of schedule.

And so this is a take of Trump's real estate days,

and he would always brag that his construction projects

were under budget and ahead of schedule.

But building is one thing.

A war is something else.

It feels like a very transparent attempt

to project a sense of competence, of control.

If there's a schedule, then there must be a plan.

And if we're ahead of schedule, then the plan

must be working.

Also, a schedule implies an end date, which

is very important for a leader who promise to not embark

upon endless wars.

It seems silly to have to say it, but wars

do not progress on neat schedules, especially

when it turns out your enemy is more capable than you imagined.

And when your partner has different objectives form your own.

So you see the president making threats with timelines

and ceasefires that come and go and get extended till the schedule,

the time frame is sort of meaningless.

He's not really trying to manage a war.

He's trying to manage the new cycle, manage the markets,

and hold on to his fracturing coalition.

No, that was an excellent piece.

And you also, by the way, were one of the best pieces

of exegesis of the art of the deal some time ago.

In a long time ago, but it still lives.

I think one thing about what Carlos said that's

so important is this time thing.

We have gotten so inward to Trump constantly saying,

wait two weeks, wait three weeks.

And it's his way of whether there's a problem here.

If I push it down the road, people might not remember it

then, and I can kind of get by that.

Wait two weeks, wait three weeks with a war.

Absolutely doesn't work.

And now, instead of being a way to push a problem aside,

it's a way to underscore that there is no plan.

And there is no easy way out of this.

Well, let's move on to this past week's election in Virginia.

Voters there approved a plan to redraw

the state's congressional maps.

So it's to possibly shift as many as four seats

to the Democrats.

This is the same scheme that California voters had already

approved.

And this was all a response to Trump's urging

Texas and some other Republican states

to redraw maps that would add to the Republican total.

EJ, which is more noteworthy?

The fact that Virginia approved this plan

or that it did so by just a little over 51% of the vote,

a good deal less than what Abigail Spanberger

pulled when she won the governorship a few months ago.

I don't think anybody was surprised that this vote was closer

than that.

First, the polls had been very clear going in.

And what you really had were Republicans

overwhelmingly against the New Alliance Democrats

overwhelmingly for them.

And independents who had voted, you know,

given Spanberger a decent vote were uneasy

about overturning the lines.

So that wasn't shocking.

I think what was so interesting is a lot of the Republican

advertising did not make the case for Republicans.

They quoted Spanberger and Barack Obama

who are leading supporters of yes on this,

of overturning the lines, things they said in the past

about the costs of gerrymandering.

So they, Democrats, fill the airwaves with Obama

saying vote yes on this because we need to go after Trump.

I think it shows that Democrats would like

to have no gerrymanders anywhere.

And they introduced a bill to have national standards

outlawing gerrymanders.

But when you have Trump threatening like this,

they said, we can't, I am so tired of you

can't bring a knife to a gunfight metaphors.

But that's what you're hearing out there.

And I think they're right.

They can't just let Republicans gerrymander and sit back

and say, we'll lose five seats here and seven seats there.

So they said no.

After the win, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries

praised the Democratic Party in a statement saying,

when they go low, we hit back hard.

Carlos, how do you like the new, when they go low,

we go just as low Democrats?

I'm not crazy about the new look.

I understand why they're doing it.

I understand the logic why they feel they have to.

Republican stated in Texas, who knows?

They may do it in Florida.

The Democrats feel they can't unilaterally disarm.

And Jeffries, of course, is riffing off

the famous Michelle Obama line when they go low, we go high.

And that was from the 2016 election,

which the Democrats went on to lose, right?

So they're tired of getting kicked around

of the knife to the gunfight metaphor.

That doesn't change the fact as they seem to recognize

that gerrymandering makes our democracy less democratic.

gerrymandering allows politicians to pick voters

rather than the other way around.

The House has always been the more representative parts

of the American legislature compared to the Senate

that is eroding with something like this.

I will cite no less an authority than the great E.J. Dion,

who in a column four years ago complained

about the anti-democratic nature of the Supreme Court's

Rucho versus Common Cause ruling.

When the court said that we can't get involved

in stopping political gerrymandering,

I completely agreed that it was anti-democratic.

I think this may be perceived as a defeat

for Donald Trump in Virginia,

but I think it's a victory for Trump's style of politics.

And I think we all lose with that result.

You know, I don't entirely agree with that.

I do dislike gerrymandering.

I do think it's anti-democratic.

And one of the reasons that I dislike that court decision

so much is that the court had the power to say

that representation should be representation.

And they could have set certain standards for the nation

where we wouldn't have these fights.

We wouldn't have Trump going down to Texas

and Democrats then going to California.

So yeah, I would much prefer a world like that.

But I think the other question about the,

if you will, Jeffrey's versus Michelle Obama quotations,

which I think is exactly the way to cite it is,

tactically, I think Democrats are all in

on doing whatever they need to do to win.

Then there's the moral question.

And it did strike me that when Eric Swannwell

was accused of sexual misconduct, the whole party,

the whole democratic party pretty much said,

you've got to get out of the race.

There wasn't a pause there.

There wasn't a, well, let's look at the facts now.

Granted, that doesn't always happen in these.

But it was an interesting moment

where Democrats decided they're going to go on in on tactics.

But there were certain things that will hurt them

if they don't stand up against what they perceive

as moral lapses and the like.

Well, I'm going to take note of something else

that happened recently in Virginia, just briefly.

Governor Spanberger signed a bill by which Virginia joins

the national popular vote interstate compact.

That's a movement to get states

with a combined majority of electoral college votes.

It's 270 to pledge those votes,

not necessarily to the winner in their state,

but to the winner of the national popular vote.

And if you add Virginia's 13 electoral votes

to those of the states that had already signed on,

they're up to 222.

This is a long shot, but a possibility,

if it turns into a democratic way of year,

that there could be enough states involved

to reach 270, which would upend the electoral college

or reduce it to a ceremonial function.

EJ, you wrote about this back in 2007.

Is it conceivable to you that this could happen?

We're citing all of EJ's old columnist, right?

I'm being held accountable here.

The two things on this that I think report one is

how we have lost our constitutional imagination.

We used to update the constitution regularly.

The framers envisioned us updating the constitution.

Heck, in the case of the electoral college,

they updated it really fast after it kind of blew up

in the 1800 election.

And it's become almost impossible to amend

the constitution for various political reasons.

And I hope we get back to a time,

you know, as recently as the 1960s,

we had a number of changes to the constitution

that were passed.

And I hope we get our constitutional imagination back.

Because I think the electoral college

is an extremely outdated and again,

undemocratic way of choosing a president,

I welcome this hitter-stake compact.

That's why I wrote about it when it passed way back

when Maryland joined it.

Do I think it'll happen?

I think it's still a long shot.

You need a number of states.

You probably need a democratic trifecta

in a number of these states.

The idea just so people understand is that

these states commit themselves,

you'll require their electors to cast their votes

for the winner of the popular vote.

And if you get 270 plus, you know,

if you get a majority of the electoral college,

committed to that, then we have direct election

of the president.

I think it will be litigated and litigated

and litigated even if they get there.

So I'm not yet confident it will get there,

but I really appreciate it because it is reminding us

that there's no democracy in the world

that has such a jury rigged system

of picking a president.

Carlos, it strikes you as a clever workaround

or a suspicious end run around the constitution.

If you like the compact,

it's a clever and necessary workaround.

If you don't, then it's an end run on the constitution.

And so I recently read

Gillipore's new book called We the People

on sort of the history of efforts to amend the constitution,

and how difficult has become to do that, as you say.

The bar is high in a logistical sense,

but also almost impossible to meet in a country

that's so polarized, so closely divided.

The last time that the United States came close

to getting rid of the electoral college,

to changing the way that we picked the presidents

was before I was born.

It was the House approved overwhelmingly

an election by popular vote in 1969,

and it failed in the Senate.

I share your concerns about the electoral college,

the undemocratic nature of the electoral college.

This feels a little gimmicky to me,

and I can see a million ways in which it can go wrong.

What if one state renegs under some kind of political pressure?

What if the popular vote nationwide is very close?

Is that trigger a nationwide recount?

Like everywhere or is it a recount

in just a few states the way it might be now?

Also, it feels pretty partisan, right?

You mentioned it would require a democratic wave.

EJ, you mentioned the democratic trifecta

would need to make this happen.

Somehow I imagine that if Al Gore and Hillary Clinton

had each won the electoral college

while losing the popular vote,

Democrats might be talking about the sage wisdom

of the founders in establishing this system.

And I don't know that all these states

would be so eager to embrace the compact.

If it happens, I hope that it would be a step along the way

to actually really amending the constitution

rather than a permanent substitute for that kind of amendment.

I would much prefer an amendment, obviously.

And, but, you know, democracy's all over the world.

France notably has Alexa president by popular vote.

I mean, if they can do it, we can do it.

But you're raising that 1969 case is really important

because one of the unfortunate things right now

is an issue that wasn't entirely partisan back then.

So yes, it would be nice if this issue,

which ought to be about democratic accountability

could become bipartisan or non-partisan again.

But we don't see that coming any time soon.

Well, onto something else,

our not quite literature conversation right now.

One of the signs of spring in years like this one.

None dare call it literature.

None dare call it literature.

Is the blossoming of books by would be presidents.

Times like these with no incumbent able to run

in the next presidential election

can probably eliminate unemployment among ghost writers

for months, if not years to come.

I've read two of the books that are out,

one by Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro,

where we keep the light.

And California governor Gavin Newsom's young man in a hurry.

Shapiro comes off as a suburban every man,

big Obama supporter who shares Obama's passion

for shooting hoops,

prides himself on listening to people who didn't

and won't vote for him.

If he were nominated, he would be,

I think the kind of Democrat who would seek broad support

and deal with the Republicans

and wouldn't be a Bernie Sanders progressive.

He is also Jewish and quite observant.

His Jewishness could make this interesting

because this is a time when it's widely believed

that there is an increase in anti-Semitism in the US.

He was in the governor's mansion when it was fire bombed.

To contrast the Shapiro book with Newsom's book,

which is very much about family and about his grandparents

and his divorced parents and his aunts and his uncles,

Shapiro writes this,

we didn't spend time with our grandparents.

Both of my parents had strained relationships

with their parents and families.

That's it for the grant, that's it.

That's the only mention they get.

That would be two chapters or three chapters

in Gavin Newsom's book about halfway through his book,

Newsom sort of explains the succession with family,

which is the sense in San Francisco

that many regarded him because of his family's closeness

to the family of J. Paul Getty, the Getty of Getty Oil,

that he was regarded as the fifth Getty's son,

that his successes might be seen as having been driven

by Getty Wealth, not by his own.

And he writes at one point that if he'd stayed in business

with one of the Getty's,

that could have robbed him of his hard earned story,

a theft that would become one of the very reasons

for writing this book.

Carlos, you've slogged through more of these books

by would-be presidents than I think anyone I know.

Maybe anyone on Earth.

Why do candidates write these books?

You know, I think a lot of them feel they have to write

this sort of dutiful campaign memoir,

even when they really don't especially want to do it.

As you say, they're often ghost-written,

they often have these painfully generic titles,

like looking forward to the truths we hold,

American son, American fill in the blank, right?

American journey, you know.

Why do they do it?

It's a chance to sanitize their lives

and their records, you know, place themselves

in the most favorable and electoral light.

It's also an opportunity as you describe with Gavin Newsom.

It's a chance to sort of try to knock out

whatever the prevailing criticism of them is.

If Gavin Newsom gives off this sense of like the,

you know, perfect hair, rich kid,

then he tries to change that perception in this book

as you just explained.

It's also a publicity exercise.

They get booked on TV and on podcasts

and on live events to talk about the book

so they get to tease the presidential run.

For the publishers, it's like a lottery ticket, right?

Because these books often don't sell well,

but if your candidate happens to become the nominee

or happens to win the presidency,

then the book becomes the best seller.

Now, those are very few and far between,

and instead you have remainder piles everywhere

with, you know, the courage to stand by Tim Palenti, right?

You know, those, those books that really don't make it.

God bless Tim Palenti.

You know, I have.

No offense to the great state of Minnesota.

I think it's really good that we are the first people

to cover one of the most important contests in America,

the book primary, because this happens cycle after cycle.

And I actually want to defend these books

because I think they can be very revealing

even sometimes to the detriment of the candidate

if they are completely empty.

And you've had historically some interesting ones.

Just one of the ones that I'm looking forward to

that's coming out at the end of May is Chris Murphy's book

and the Senator from Connecticut.

It's not clear whether he's running for president or not.

It's called the crisis of the common good,

fight for meaning and connection in a broken America.

And it's a real argument that combines populist economics

with a serious look at loneliness and social isolation

and the breakdown of community.

And I think it's going to spark an interesting debate.

You also had people jump the queue.

Pete Buttigieg had a very interesting book,

the shortest way home that I liked.

I reviewed it back then that came out just before the 2020

election, which was actually a good idea

because he wasn't known by anybody.

And it proved to be a pretty good introduction

to go to Carlos's point, sold a lot of books

when his campaign took off.

If I can just very briefly shout out

three really important ones historically.

John F. Kennedy's profile is encouraged.

Written while he was a senator, debated how much

should he write, how much should his speech write

or ten swords and write.

But he created a phrase that entered the popular lexicon.

Richard Nixon's six crises.

Yes, I'm going to stand up here for Richard Nixon

with a very interesting look that was quite candid

about moments, relatively speaking,

we're dealing with self-serving books,

but relatively candid look at six major moments in his life

and the one that really paid off for the publishers,

Barack Obama's dreams from my father,

wasn't a bestseller, and then it took off.

And it's a good book.

Yeah, I know you've mentioned, there is a downside risk.

You can write a book that harms you

and one recent example of that would be Christy Knowham's.

Yes, yes.

So the journalist, Michael,

she'd be without shooting the dog,

if you write a book, will be one of the rules.

Never ever do that.

Right.

Well, it was amazing.

The journalist Michael Schaefer wrote

an article in Politico about that episode.

And he said that the rule of political books should first

do no harm is the sort of number one rule.

And usually they are harmless.

I completely agree.

I've made sort of a living out of mining these books

to find the sort of unintentionally revealing detail

that they often do.

Now, you know, what Christy Knowham did

is admit that she shot her dog, not just shot her dog.

Shot her dog out of sort of anger and embarrassment

and then proceeded to shoot her goat

because the goat was right there

and she had never liked the goat either, you know?

So it turns out these books can be harmful.

They certainly hurt her chances for VP,

which was something that was vaguely in the air at the time.

They would give us a sense of how sort of thoughtlessly

and callously she would serve as DHS Secretary.

So that proved useful for at least this reader.

Are there any actual upsides that can we cite someone

who's campaign was aided by a book?

So my rule of presidential mem,

if Michael Schaeffer's was Do Know Harm,

my rule of presidential memo writing

is that the closer the book is to your time in office,

whether before or after, the worse the book is, right?

And the further removed it is from your time,

the better you tend to write it.

But there are three great books to my mind

that certainly have aided the,

if not the campaign, the place in history of the writers.

One is Dreams from My Father, as you said, EJ.

The other is The Memoirs of Ulysses Grant.

Ulysses is great.

And he wrote like a beautiful memoir

that really didn't even address his time in the White House,

right?

In fact, reading it, you would never think

that this guy was a politician.

And the last one I will mention is by someone who could have

made a living as a writer instead of a politician.

That was Jimmy Carter.

And my favorite of Jimmy Carter's books

is one called An Hour Before Daylight,

which is a memoir, which he wrote 20 years after the White House,

about growing up on his father's farm in Georgia

during the Depression.

And really, all three of those were far removed

from their political aspirations and from their time in office.

And I think that made them better.

Well, on that note, we come to our traditional last question,

which is a set aside politics and wars.

What brought some joy into your life since last we met?

And E.J., why don't we start with you?

Well, I actually want to stick to books

because I was thinking about this.

The joy that continuators have brought to my life.

Now, who are continuators?

I happen to love popular fiction mysteries and thrillers.

And when a successful writer dies,

there are still lots of fans out there

who love the series, who love the characters,

want to stay with them.

And publishers and often the families of these late authors

realize people still want to read these books.

And so for me, keeping those series alive

has been an awesome thing.

Anne Hillerman's a good example.

The daughter of Tony Hillerman,

the author of the great Navajo series,

which are beautiful about the Southwest,

about Navajo's spirituality.

Tom Clancy was the hunt for red October.

This may be the most successful continuator franchise.

He's got a regiment of people,

or in his case, I suppose it would be a crew

since it's mostly naval, a crew of people,

keeping him alive.

One of my very favorite set of mysteries

are Rex Stout's Nero Wolf,

the enormous detective who lives in Brownstone in New York City.

A writer called Robert Goldsboro,

was his continuator.

I discovered Rex Stout through his continuator

and then gobbled up all the rest of the books.

So thank you to these folks for keeping a traditional life

and for entertaining an awful lot of us.

And I would just say John Lakerra's son

has to be here today.

I was going to mention that one, so thank you.

Carlos, I love that you brought up the continuators

because it reminded me of my favorite novelist of all time

is the late Mario Vargasiosa, who passed away last year.

The greatest proven novelist, Snowbell Laureate.

And in his Nobel speech, he talked about

how the first stories he ever wrote were continuations.

Oh wow.

As a little boy, he didn't want the stories that he loved

to end, so he just kept writing.

Bless you for lifting up my popular fiction case

into something truly profound.

No, because I'm going to bring it,

I'm going to bring it right back to where you were

because, and we did not plan this,

so one thing that we do as a family at home

is we read together.

We might read over dinner.

Someone reads aloud, and we get through a lot of stories

that way.

Recently, I'm going to mention one that we read recently,

which gave me a lot of personal joy.

When I was a kid, my parents would get

those sort of abridged condensed books from readers' digest.

They would comment like four mini novels in one in one hard

color.

I remember those.

And there was one by Dorothy Gilman, who

was a very popular spy novelist.

She wrote these novels called The Mrs. Polyfax Novels.

And it was this northeastern elderly woman

who somehow was involved with the CIA and was a spy.

She wrote a book, Dorothy Gilman, called The Tight Wrote Walker.

It had all sorts of murder and politics and sex and corruption.

And when I was maybe 12 years old,

I just thought this was the greatest novel in the world.

But it had never occurred to me that there was a fuller

version of it, and that it was out there in the world.

And I just thought of it a few weeks ago.

And so I ordered it, and I got the full one.

And that became the story that we read.

So it was a chance to have this great communal experience

with the kids, but also a throwback for me

to finish the novel that I'd never fully

read when I was in middle school.

Well, I'm going to put in a word for basketball.

And that was this.

I delighted in watching a game which I really didn't care

about either team.

But in watching Victor Wembejana, the seven-foot four-inch

player who is redefining the game of basketball,

took me back to being a kid seeing Wilk Chamberlain

play as a rookie in Madison Square Garden,

a guy who was changing the game of basketball,

not only the biggest man on the court,

but the best athlete on the court.

And I was so thrilled with the way Wembejana was playing

in this game in which his team beat the Portland Trailblazers

as they were expected to.

That I tuned in a few nights later to game number two,

just at the moment when I see Wembejana sprawled

on the ground and being taken off or running off to the locker room

to be treated under the concussion protocol.

And it just reminded me what a risky thing it can be

to be a professional athlete and how quickly you can lose it.

I don't know when he comes back, but he's great.

He's an extraordinary talent.

Thank you, I love that.

The notion of watching excellence and innovation

like that in sports go together,

it's really an amazing thing.

Well, thanks to both of you once again, Carlos Lazada,

EJ Dion.

Thank you, Robert.

Great.

Appreciate it.

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Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker,

Carol Saburo, Epheme Shapiro, and Amin Sahota.

The fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker,

and Michelle Harris.

The head of operations is Shannon Busta,

audience support by Christina Samuluski.

The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.