openpolitics.com

For Donald Trump, calling someone a loser is not merely an insult, and calling someone a winner is not merely a compliment. The division of the world into those who win and those who lose is of paramount philosophical importance to him, the clearest reflection of his deep, abiding faith that the world is a zero-sum game and you can only gain if someone else is failing.

.. On the core issues he cares about the most — international trade, immigration, foreign policy — he’s strikingly consistent. He’s always been anti-immigrant, always been protectionist, always been fiercely nationalistic on matters of war and peace.

More generally, he’s always believed in the fundamental zero-sum nature of the world. Whether he’s discussing real estate in New York, or his ’00s reality TV career, or his views on immigration and trade, he consistently views life as a succession of deals. Those deals are best thought of as fights over who gets what share of a fixed pot of resources. The idea of collaborating for mutual benefit rarely arises. Life is dealmaking, and dealmaking is about crushing your enemies.

“You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win,” he writes in Think Big and Kick Ass, co-authored with Bill Zanker of the Learning Annex. “That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.” To “crush the other side and take the benefits,” he declares, is “better than sex — and I love sex.”

.. In Manhattan real estate, wealth is not created by offering new products that make consumers’ lives better.

.. Manhattan real estate is a zero-sum game.

Precisely, it’s an area of business characterized by what economists call “rent-seeking.”

.. The result, as Adam Davidson has astutely noted, is that Trump’s “whole worldview is based on a rent-seeking vision of the economy, in which there’s a fixed amount of wealth that can only be redistributed, never grow. It is a world­view that makes perfect sense for the son of a New York real estate tycoon who grew up to be one, too.”

.. even if there were some losers, you could simply raise taxes and redistribute some of the gains to them.

.. he appears to sincerely believe the proper way to evaluate whether a policy is working out for the US is to examine not whether it makes the US better off than it was but whether it leaves the US better off relative to other countries. The “great” in “making America great again” is “better than the rest,” not “better,” period.

.. Over the medium term, both the US and Chinese economies have been growing, but China’s has been growing a lot faster. Overall, both countries are much richer than they were 20 years ago. This is not how Trump sees things.

.. As the general election begins in earnest, it’s natural to expect Trump to do what most general election candidates do: pivot to the center and become a more normal politician. But Trump’s writing suggests that on the issues where he diverges most markedly from the political mainstream, his views are deeply held and strikingly consistent — much more so than either his critics or his supporters recognize.

.. His core philosophy is that cooperation is folly and America cannot thrive unless others fail.

.. Take the very first paragraph, in which Trump describes deals as a kind of art. His life is a creative enterprise, about joy and self-expression, rather than making money for money’s sake:

.. He sees getting attention as helpful, even if it’s bad attention. He might look bad in the short run, but notoriety increases his influence and thus helps him make deals — the ultimate marker of success.

.. bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all,” he writes. “Controversy, in short, sells.

.. Living without trying to “win,” Trump says, is barely worth living at all.

.. Trump’s xenophobia is not an opportunistic invention. It’s core to his political identity.

.. But it’s exactly the book you might expect the Donald Trump ofThe Apprentice to write: ruthless, impatient, and committed to dealing harshly with people less as a matter of tough love than to prove he simply can’t be bossed around.

.. So he started thinking more positively and dreaming up the next wave of deals. When he marched in to tell his weary accountants about his big plans, he writes, “they thought I had cracked, that maybe I was beginning to hallucinate from the pressure.” But in his version of events, the accountants’ balance sheet realities were simply less powerful than the sheer force of his will.

.. Never Give Up is fascinating as an insight into the sort of person for whom it works: someone who can make his own reality by changing his mindset. Trump enthusiastically endorses bluffing, but, he insists, “I’m not pretending in any sense of the word.” It’s perfectly believable. Trump is simply acting like a winner until the bout of self-doubt passes and he remembers he’s been a winner all along.

.. The problem with these sections is that when your conception of the presidency is “making deals” and “cheating foreigners before they cheat us,” it’s hard to apply that frame to the federal budget or to health care reform.

.. The problem is that the issues he is passionate about aren’t the issues that stir Americans’ souls.

.. For his zero-sum view of the world to apply to domestic policy, he needs internal enemies he can negotiate against. By the start of the 2016 campaign, when he called Mexican immigrants rapists and suggested that Muslims be banned from entering the US, he’d finally found some.

.. “If you do things a little differently,” he writes of the media, “if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you.” The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. “When,” he asks “was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!”

That sort of marketing claim — what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls“bullshit,” a deliberate falsehood that nonetheless doesn’t truly rise to the level of a lie — is part of what Trump calls “a mutually profitable two-way relationship with the media”

.. The important proposition of the book is simply that America is broken and Trump has the business skills to fix it. He’s not going to tell you exactly how it’s going to happen. He’s not even going to promise you that the things he says are 100 percent accurate (rather than calculated for political effect). But he’s a guy who gets things done. So trust him. Just look how serious and determined and angry he seems on the cover.