President Trump, who considers himself a master deal maker, has never made any secret of his belief that the secret to winning at negotiation is to keep the other side off balance.
But a year into his second term, his act is starting to wear on both allies and adversaries, some of whom are starting to view him as so mercurial and unreliable that they appear willing to consider waiting him out or turning away from him rather than enduring the abrupt starts, stops and humiliations that can accompany engaging with him.
In foreign policy, tariffs, immigration and his pressure campaign on universities, Mr. Trump’s threats, retreats, twists and turns have left negotiating partners feeling at times that they are being used to score political points and that there is little purpose to engaging on substance when his moods and demands can shift in an instant.
“What Trump is identifying as unpredictability is actually anxiety about his electoral prospects,” said Timothy L. O’Brien, a biographer of Mr. Trump.
“He’s aware that he’s going into a possibly daunting midterm election and he’s throwing these Hail Mary passes in order to try to cultivate voters, to demonstrate that he’s in charge, to seek retribution from perceived enemies, but I don’t think it has anything to do with unpredictability in the service of great deal making,” he said.
After seeming to break a logjam in long-stalled negotiations with Harvard University, Mr. Trump abruptly reversed course, withdrawing his agreement not to seek a $200 million fine from the school and instead demanding that it pay $1 billion. The White House called it part of the normal back-and-forth of negotiations, but it strengthened the hand of those at Harvard who say the school should not agree to the president’s demands.
After threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark, Mr. Trump abruptly backed down, but not before infuriated allies suggested that it was time to stop thinking of the United States as a reliable partner.
Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada traveled to China for a landmark state visit, during which he and President Xi Jinping of China announced that they would slash tariffs.
“In terms of the way that our relationship has progressed in recent months with China, it is more predictable, and you see results coming from that,” Mr. Carney said.
He then gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he said there had been a “rupture” in the world order. He did not name Mr. Trump, but it was clear that he blamed him for the hostilities.
“I will talk today about the breaking of the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a brutal reality where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraint,” Mr. Carney said in Davos.
White House officials say Mr. Trump’s negotiating style has yielded results, pointing to new trade deals and peace deals he secured over the last year. They also tout the president’s efforts to secure lower drug prices for Americans and the agreements he has made with seven higher-education institutions.
“The one thing that isn’t changing in 2026 is deal-maker-in-chief President Trump consistently proving the naysayers wrong about his ability to leverage the powers of the presidency and America’s might to secure better deals for the American people,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Still, even some of Mr. Trump’s allies privately concede that his penchant for unpredictability has drawbacks, most often for the economy. The president dangles trade wars with frequency, and when he is peeved, tariffs are often doled out as threats on social media. So even when a deal is struck, the other parties are never fully sure Mr. Trump will not try to change the terms.
Particularly on trade, it can appear that escalation — or easing — of tensions is subject simply to the president’s whims. That approach has made countries less confident that the United States will do what it says it will do, pushing them toward each other and, crucially, toward China.
As Mr. Trump often says, “I don’t rule out anything.”
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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