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.
“Everybody wants to come and make a deal,” the president said this month.
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. The war in Ukraine is still raging, and the president has floated the idea of abandoning peace talks altogether. Hamas is still holding hostages in Gaza despite Mr. Trump’s warning on social media that the terrorist group must release them all or “you are DEAD!” And while Mr. Trump insists that countries are racing to strike trade deals with the United States, the details are scant.
“You undermine your negotiating position when you pick fights with literally everybody — big, small, friend, foe, economy, national security — at the same time,” said Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, an international consulting firm. “On balance, he’s going to have a much harder time because he’s trying to do all this stuff at the same time.”
For years, Mr. Trump has cultivated an image as a master negotiator, using his past as a real estate developer and reality television star to form the core of his political identity. And while making deals on enormously complex issues takes both time and care, Mr. Trump’s inability — so far, at least — to deliver in the ways that he promised has exposed the gulf between his rhetoric and his accomplishments.
For Mr. Trump’s aides and allies, their confidence in the president remains undiminished — and whenever his approach is questioned, they are aligned in their response. The president, they remind detractors, wrote the 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.”
“No matter the task, President Trump will always get the best deal for the American people,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “In less than 100 days, President Trump has leveled the playing field for our manufacturers, brought us closer to peace in Gaza and Ukraine, flooded the US with historic investment commitments, returned American hostages, and held universities accountable for fostering antisemitism. There is no negotiation too daunting for President Trump and he continues to prove his critics wrong.”
‘We’re Just Going to Take a Pass’
Mr. Trump’s negotiating style has always been more blunt-force than give-and-take, using threats to get his way. He will often demand allies and adversaries alike propose a deal, then he will decide if he likes it.
After using economic coercion in the form of sweeping tariffs, Mr. Trump on Tuesday called on China to come ahead with a deal. “If they don’t make a deal, we’ll set the deal, because we’re, we’re the ones that set the deal,” he said.
Mr. Trump also has threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal funds from universities if they do not comply with his demands, and he has issued executive orders against law firms that do not bend to his will.
But he has shown little patience for the nuts and bolts, dipping in and out of negotiations and largely leaving aides to work out the details, according to current and former advisers.
Above all, the president is eager to announce success.
Using the backdrop of the White House, he has promoted private and foreign companies’ investments in the United States. He has bragged about the law firms that have signed arrangements to provide free legal services toward causes he supports. And he has celebrated efforts to secure the release of Americans imprisoned abroad.
But his eagerness to declare a win also means that the terms of the deals have been left unclear. The president, for example, appears to have a much more expansive view of what free services the law firms that signed agreements with him might provide. It is also unclear if they signed written deals with specific terms or less formal agreements.
In other cases, it means Mr. Trump will move on quickly. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States would abandon its efforts to end the war in Ukraine in the coming days if there was not significant progress toward a peace deal. Mr. Trump later agreed with Mr. Rubio’s assessment.
“If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just going to take a pass,” he told reporters on Friday in the Oval Office. While campaigning, Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to end the war in Ukraine within a day. Last month, he said he was “being a little bit sarcastic” about that timeline.
On Tuesday, Mr. Rubio decided to skip the next stage of the Ukrainian cease-fire talks.
The war in Ukraine is far from the only area where Mr. Trump is still in search of a deal. In January, the United States helped broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that led to the release of some hostages and the hope that the war could come to an end. But Israel has since resumed its bombardment campaign in Gaza and the talks are deadlocked.
Iranian officials have said that they will continue talks with the Trump administration about a new nuclear deal, though the country’s foreign minister said that Washington’s shifting messages on its objective — whether it’s to limit Iran’s nuclear program or fully dismantle it — were “not helpful.” Mr. Trump’s effort to strike a deal with Iran comes after his withdrawal, in 2018, from a deal signed during the Obama administration.
Domestically, Columbia University struck a deal with Mr. Trump to avoid losing $400 million in federal funding, while Harvard University rejected the administration’s demands and has vowed to fight back. Four law firms that Mr. Trump has targeted with executive orders have fought them in court, and federal judges have ruled in their favor so far, temporarily halting Mr. Trump’s actions.
‘The Stakes Are Different’
Democratic critics contend that Mr. Trump’s penchant for deal-making creates an unfair system, benefiting countries and institutions that seek to curry favor with the president and squeezing out others. Last week, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the Trump administration expressing concern that the president’s trade policy was “becoming a corrupt scheme to enrich administration officials and those loyal to them.”
“It appears to be a way for him to gain favor for things that he wants, and we don’t even know how much of a favor he’s gaining from these entities,” Representative Judy Chu of California, who helped organize the letter, said in an interview. “That lays the basis for corruption.”
Wendy R. Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, said she worries about Mr. Trump’s transactional approach.
“Trump’s negotiating style comes out of his work as a real estate developer,” she said. “If a real estate deal doesn’t work, you just go on to the next deal or you take it to court. In diplomatic matters — whether that’s with a university or with another government — you are doing something for the public good. The stakes are different. It can mean the difference between war and peace, between academic freedom and censorship, between the rule of law and authoritarianism.”
But even critics of Mr. Trump’s approach say they expect he will eventually succeed in at least securing at least some new trade deals. The president’s aides have been working to iron out new arrangements after he paused his so-called reciprocal tariffs for 90 days.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s advisers had met with 34 countries in the last week to discuss trade deals, and said that the administration has 18 proposals on paper.
“There is a lot of progress being made,” she said.
Mr. Bremmer, of the Eurasia Group, contrasted Mr. Trump’s style with that of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who he said struggled at times because of his unwillingness to be tough on foreign counterparts.
“I expect that Trump will actually have a number of announcements from friendly, mostly weak countries, certainly much weaker than the U.S., that are desperate to get something done and not have a fight with the most powerful nation on the planet,” he said.
And with potential deals on the horizon, Mr. Trump seems interested in at least dropping by some of the trade talks. Last week, he made an unexpected appearance at a meeting with a Japanese delegation and spoke with the president of Mexico, later teasing progress toward new agreements. While hosting Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy at the White House, Mr. Trump didn’t hesitate to make another big promise.
“There’ll be a trade deal,” he said, “100 percent.”
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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