Win, Lose, but No Compromise

a simple binary rule dominates their politics: “I am strong, why should I compromise? I am weak, how can I compromise?”

.. That is not always true in other walks of life. We just got that lesson at the Olympics. American runner Abbey D’Agostino clipped New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin from behind in the women’s 5000-meter qualifying heat, sending both tumbling to the ground well short of the finish.

The Associated Press reported: “D’Agostino got up, but Hamblin was just lying there. She appeared to be crying. Instead of running in pursuit of the others, D’Agostino crouched down and put her hand on the New Zealander’s shoulder, then under her arms to help her up, and softly urged her not to quit.” They embraced at the finish.

.. There is no doubt that Republicans during the Obama presidency pioneered and perfected this scorched-earth politics and have now paid a price for it. They let themselves be led around by a group of no-compromise talk-radio gasbags, think-tank ideologues in the pay of one industry or another, Fox News know-nothings and an alt-right fringe, who, together, so poisoned the G.O.P. garden that an invasive species, Donald Trump, just took it over.

.. It will be a tragedy if center-right Republicans conclude that their only problem is Donald Trump, and that once he’s gone the G.O.P. will be theirs again. Their party is over.

What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’

Any serious economic proposal to ‘‘make America great again’’ would surely mention education, fiscal policy, entrepreneurship and trade with the entire world, not just China — issues he makes little or no reference to. No doubt Trump’s list of priorities reflects the issues that he and his advisers perceive, probably correctly, to be red meat for Republican primary voters. But tellingly, it’s also a set of issues for which the ‘‘deal’’ — that is, Trump’s unique ability to make deals — can be presented as his crucial promise.

.. The key issues at play in a national or global economy (inflation, currency-exchange rates, unemployment, overall growth) are impossible to control through any sort of deal. They reflect underlying structural forces in an economy, like the level of education and skill of the population, the productivity of companies, the amount of government spending and the actions of the central bank.

.. If you think of the transactions that make people the most frustrated, they are, most likely, rent-seeking transactions in which some force is imposing a better ‘‘deal’’ for one party. Your cable service costs more and is less responsive because local monopoly allows the company to make a better ‘‘deal’’ for itself. The owner of the local pro-sports team can make a ‘‘deal’’ with the city for a new stadium, or else the team packs up and leaves town. Without real competition, one or both sides of a rent-seeking transaction lack leverage, and so decisions can be hashed out only by powerful people making deals in back rooms.

.. I met many of Iraq’s leading businesspeople, and they always talked about ‘‘deals.’’ As one explained to me, there would be some business opportunity — building a hospital, say, or getting a license to import a new line of cars — and Saddam Hussein’s family would essentially auction off the opportunity to the handful of wealthy businesspeople whom they deemed trustworthy.

.. Manhattan real estate development is about as far as it is possible to get, within the United States, from that Econ 101 notion of mutually beneficial transactions. This is not a marketplace characterized by competition and dynamism; instead, Manhattan real estate looks an awful lot more like a Middle Eastern rentier economy.

.. In recent weeks, hearing Trump talk, I’ve realized that his economic worldview is entirely coherent. It makes sense. He is not just a rent-seeker himself; his 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.

.. The left, right and center of the economics profession all agree that reducing rent-seeking behavior, and improving overall growth, is essential if we want to ‘‘make America great again.’’

.. In a rentier state, every ambitious person knows that the way to become rich and powerful is to grab the sources of wealth and hold onto them, by force if necessary. It’s no accident that, around the world, rentier states tend to be run by unelected dictators — the ultimate dealmakers in chief.

Zero-sum Trump: What you learn from reading 12 of Donald Trump’s books

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.