Seven months into the second Trump administration, the president has picked fights with colleges, law firms, trading partners and private businesses, threatening them with investigations, tariffs or other consequences as he seeks to enact his agenda.
And he has also offered them a simple way out of their Trump-instigated troubles, one that would hardly seem out of place in the clubby, mob-connected Manhattan he came up in: Pay up.
And so they are. One by one, the president’s foes — and even some of his purported allies — are agreeing to spend big on his terms, either so they can go about their business or avoid something worse. Some of the president’s critics see it as nothing less than extortion.
New reporting from my colleagues shows that Trump personally interceded as his aides negotiated with Columbia University, insisting they secure a $200 million payment on top of the policy changes it had already committed to make.
And it’s not just Columbia.
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Other colleges: Brown University agreed to pay $50 million to state work force development programs to keep its government funding in place, and an emerging agreement between Harvard and the government could see the university spending $500 million in a bid to maintain its federal funding and make a litany of federal investigations go away.
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Trading partners: The president has urged trading partners to show him the money in the form of investments as a way to avoid steeper tariffs, something my colleague Alan Rappeport described as directly injecting his 1987 autobiography, “The Art of the Deal,” into trade policy. (“The dollar always talks in the end,” Trump and his co-author Tony Schwartz wrote in that book, which helped propel Trump to new heights of fame and cement his business-savvy image.)
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Private companies: The Trump administration said it would issue licenses to two companies wishing to sell A.I. chips in China, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, only after those businesses took the unusual step of agreeing to give the federal government a 15 percent cut of those sales. It was a highly unusual agreement, my colleague Tripp Mickle wrote, but one the companies felt they had no choice but to make. The administration is also discussing taking a 10 percent stake in Intel, the struggling chip-maker, Tripp and Lauren Hirsch reported this week.
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Law firms: Elite law firms ponied up nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services after they were targeted with punitive executive orders or other threats. Trump has hinted that he’ll draw on it as a kind of personal legal war chest, and my colleagues reported today that two of the firms are said to be doing free work for the Commerce Department.
It is not unusual for the federal government to reach settlements with entities it has investigated as they seek to avoid trials or other drawn-out proceedings. But it is unusual for a president to personally — and sometimes publicly — push for such payments himself with the full force of the federal government behind him.
The approach, however, is consistent with the highly personalized and transactional approach Trump honed over his decades in New York. To him, leverage was everything, money is power — and he always looked for a way to come out on top.
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