TRUMP’S STRATEGY: NEGOTIATE FROM A POSITION OF MISTRUST, AND MAINTAIN WALK AWAY

TRUMP’S STRATEGY: NEGOTIATE FROM A POSITION OF MISTRUST, AND MAINTAIN WALK AWAY POWER., CAUSING YOUR OPPONENTS TO CREATIVELY NEGOTIATE ON THE DEFENSE.

He uses this strategy all the time. He did it throughout his career. He did it through the campaign. He did it prior to taking office. And he has continued to do it since taking office.

1) ACT STUPID (OR PARANOID): “Say what the base thinks, and cause the state bureaucracy, media, public intellectuals, and academy, to justify its position thereby educating the people.”

He has been doing this to the media and they do his bidding. It is how he obtained free press. It is how they are under his control today.

In this way he talks to his base, who understands exactly what he is doing, and avoids putting the opponents in control of the discourse.

As long as his base will repeat what he says the opposition will remain on the defensive.

I think most people forget that he wrote a book on the art of the deal. Trump forgot more about negotiation in the past hour than most people on earth will ever know.

I’m not the only person who has been putting this explanation forward – dozens of others have. It’s obvious. It’s just not obvious to the solipsistic left. People who speak in emotion today not consequence in the future.

2) USE HYPERBOLE (The Kantian Categorical Imperative):

One of the other techniques he makes use of is that conservatives speak in hyperbole in order to accentuate the conservative intuition to treat all moral statements under the Kantian Categorical Imperative.

What is it? Conservatives always ask themselves, subconsciously: “What if everyone did that, or what would be the consequences of a lot of this happening?” (The intuition of the conservative time preference).

3) ACT DECISIVELY ACCORDING WHAT THEY EXPECT: ACTING STUPID.

This technique results in forcing all other parties to use creative means of preventing that EXTREME (which you never intend), and will come to the table with either an admission of failure so that you can move on.

In other words, it is a means of exporting cost and blame by forcing others to do work defensively. This produces the least posturing, less deceitful, most detailed explanatory responses by others, and it leaves responsibility for failure at their feet. Your hands are clean.

4) SIEZE OPPORTUNITY FOR SUCCESS, WHILE DEMONSTRATING HOW DISHONEST AND MANIPULATIVE AND UNTRUSTWORTHY YOUR OPPONENTS ARE.

Now from personal experience, this requires some acting skill, but all it really requires is ‘keeping your finger on the pulse of your workers’ and using whatever concerns they have (which are far more paranoid and creative than you can ever imagine being) against your opponents’.

Trump is a MASTER OF THE DEAL. Not of testimony, not of fully informed, consent, but of negotiation and the deal.

Basically, force people to make you happy, but never admit to being satisfied. Then anyone who was at all honest and helpful, heap praise upon, and make sure gets access to future opportunities.

THE IGNORANCE OF THE TALKING HEAD CLASS

People who babble, advocate, politic, and criticize for a living rarely if EVER have had any responsibility for anything other than themselves. Those who manage the incomes of many families, tens, hundreds or thousands; those who manage the money of investors; those who manage the political demands of millions; all have responsibility as long as they can fail. Unfortunately, politicians can’t really fail because – while we could – we don’t measure them the way we measure business, industry, and finance.

When you fight in business you fight, and when you fight in business in ‘the trades’ you’re dealing with very small margins, and very ‘creative’ means of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and outright deceit.

NEGOTIATION AS PROXY WARFARE

Imagine (you probably can’t) what it is like to negotiate with Yassir Arafat, any given president of Iran, any given member of the Russia duma, or any given Chinese official. In these countries DECEPTION is not only an art, but it is HONORABLE. In the case of Chinese it is simply good manners to lie in most circumstances.

Trump uses very well understood negotiating techniques. They have names. People teach them. You can hire people to use them for you. Most of us cannot grasp the art of negotiation with enemies, competitors, and frenemies. (Foreign Governments, Domestic Politicians, Bureaucrats, Unions, Financiers, Construction, Garbage Disposal, Maintenance, Housekeeping, and Utility companies.)

Imagine what it is to negotiate with rooms full of lawyers trying to seek advantage through contractual nuance (deceit). (You wouldn’t believe what I have heard from the top firms in the USA like Wilson Sonsini – ‘Here is how to screw your common shareholders….’, and “here is how we’re going to help the other side screw you”. Or what I have heard from the Clinton Foundation (which I won’t repeat here).

(Conversely, FWIW, the CIA (er…State Department) never lied to me … ever. They only say “I can’t discuss those topics.) And my (limited) experience in the Justice Department was that everyone is lying all the time, and at every opportunity, and doing as little as possible, taking as much vacation time, and politicking for another position. Conversely the Postal Inspectors were about as straight up and honest as you can get.)

Trump has vast experience with ‘the unskilled laboring classes’, ‘the semi-skilled working classes’, and the ‘the skilled classes’, the ‘managerial classes’, the ‘professional classes’, and the bureaucratic classes. He has build his career negotiating with people in an industry (construction) where corruption is rife at political, government, union, and contract or level, and where profits and losses are often determined in by the resolution of conflicts over prices and responsibility in courts, and where everyone is greedy and trying to get a dime out of everyone else.

Unfortunately, college educated yet ignorant and questionably intelligent america, and the ‘talkers’ generally lack any responsibility for people, money, and tangible results of any scale, and have lost all cognition of what it’s like to do this kind of ‘real work’. The kind of work his BASE does every single day.

HE’S DOING WHAT THE WORKING AND PRODUCING PUBLIC WANT, AND WHAT CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUALS (LIKE ME) WANT.

As someone who has spent a few decades now working on performative truth (and what we refer to as the scientific method), I think many of us in the population are desirous of putting the shoe on the other public intellectuals foot so to speak, and therefore changing the strategy to where we actively interrogate the state, academy, and media. If for no other reason than the misuse of statistics, and the misrepresentation of nearly all ‘research’ in anthropology, economics, the social sciences, and psychology.

Even within that discipline of economics, I find it trivially easy to demonstrate that almost every measure we can find constitutes cherrypicking and does not fully account for the changes in various forms of capital, and the cost of doing so. Isn’t economics of growth de-facto cherrypicking?

Anyway. On behalf of the public I prefer that politicians prosecute the academy state and media. Because those of us out here in the fields (tiny think tanks included) are clearly not able to do so in sufficient numbers.

Cheers.

( Note: I made a living by buying, reforming, consolidating, and selling companies. I have used this strategy for decades at admittedly smaller scales. And I have a more ‘ruthless’ reputation than Trump does – at my infinitely smaller scale of operations. )