The foundational myth of Donald Trump is that everything is a deal. “Deals are my art form,” he wrote in—of course—The Art of the Deal. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” This image has been enormously profitable to Trump personally, forming the basis for his real-estate empire, television persona, and career in politics. It has also, at times, provided his supporters a means to process and defend the things they’d rather not. All those nasty things he says? All those destructive ideas? It’s called bargaining. There’s a bit of slack built into everything when you’re known as the guy who does deals. It is preferable, in any event, to being known as a guy who committed sexual assault.
The art of the deal is a useful lens for understanding how Trump ended up with his own line of steaks, but it’s an incomplete framework for thinking about his presidency. Haggling over air rights and residuals is different than attempting to acquire a canal, in general, but particularly when one of the interested parties controls a nuclear arsenal. A deal implies a degree of mutual consent. The salient feature of Trump’s governing style is the power and menace he brings to the table, and his willingness to use both to secure what he wants. With Trump, everything is not a deal. It is a hostage negotiation.
America’s titans of industry, no stranger to dealmaking and negotiation, have demonstrated with their checkbooks and fawning statements a clear-eyed recognition of the new rules. They’d rather not find out what happens to people who don’t pay up.
Just consider his handling of one of the federal government’s core responsibilities—emergency assistance after natural disasters. During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to hold future disaster relief for California hostage, telling supporters, shortly before they were abandoned without transportation at a Coachella Valley ranch, that the money would only be released if Governor Gavin Newsom changed the state’s water management policies to divert more resources to agriculture. “We’re going to take care of your water situation,” he said. “We’ll force it down his throat, and we’ll say, ‘Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have.’”
It’s not an idle threat. His administration did reject California’s request for disaster relief after a series of 2020 fires. It never approved a request for wildfire aid from Washington state that same year. Following the 2018 fires in Orange County Trump was reportedly so unwilling to assist people he considered political enemies that a staffer on the National Security Council had to provide data on the number of Republicans who lived there to change his mind. Trump balked at sending more money to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “It was very much a business deal,” that same NSC staffer told E&E News. “Like, ‘This a lot of money. What are we getting in return for it?’”
This way of thinking has filtered down to his party’s rank-and-file. In early January, in response to the fires that have destroyed whole neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles, causing $250 billion in damage, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told Fox News that, “If they want the money, then there should be consequences.” There is a sadistic glee at work in this kind of bargaining, like a Bond villain dangling the last vial of antidote in exchange for the encryption code. Give us what we want or the kid gets it.
This ransom-note politics is everywhere. Trump has talked a lot, in recent weeks, about the prospect of annexing Greenland (which is currently an autonomous territory of Denmark) and the Panama Canal Zone (which the United States returned to its namesake nation under the terms of a 1979 treaty). There is no good-faith haggling to be done there—you cannot simply buy things that are not for sale. Instead, Trump has talked about forcing a deal by refusing to rule out using the military to acquire both territories. At the same time, he’s threatening to blow up NATO unless member nations begin spending a significantly higher share of their GDP on defense. Fire money takes many different forms.
As with disaster funding, such threats are a continuation of his first-term m.o. Trump’s promise to hold military support hostage unless the Ukrainian government manufactured dirt on Joe Biden was the impetus for Trump’s first impeachment. Mike Pence was, for a time on January 6, 2021, almost literally his hostage. And the threat of violence, from the state he controls then and now or the supporters he easily manipulates, hangs over every demand he puts forth. (One Republican senator privately cited Trump’s capacity to sic mobs on critics as their reason for voting against conviction after the Capitol riot—the hostage mentality stuck, even after the insurrectionists left.) Some of these threats are more serious than others, but they all follow from the same ethos—that you get what you want by holding a gun to the things other people hold dear. It’s a Trumpian twist on an old adage: Never let another person’s crisis go to waste.
There are signs that hostage politics is already delivering major returns. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted last fall on corruption charges, seems to believe he can secure a pardon, or call off the prosecution, if he assists Trump’s immigration crackdown. (He’s publicly committed to not criticizing the president’s action.) CBS is reportedly considering settling a frivolous $10 billion defamation suit—in which Trump argued that the network committed “election interference” in its routine editing of a Kamala Harris interview—because ownership believes it might help them secure support for an unrelated merger.
After Trump spent years threatening the world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos, and the companies he owns, Bezos has now waved a white flag, helping to foot the bill for the inauguration, offering to work with the president in his second term, and paying $40 million to make a documentary about Melania Trump. The world’s third-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg, whom Trump previously said should go to jail, has likewise fallen in line. It was more convenient to pay the ransom than keep up the facade of resistance.
You could call this “driving a hard bargain.” Policymaking is rife with cajoling, with carrots and sticks. Picture, for a moment, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But negotiations over spending bills don’t typically center around punitive threats, even in the House.
For Trump, this simple power dynamic is built into his central policy proposal this year: crippling tariffs against Canada, China, Mexico, and any other country that crosses him. For rank-and-file citizens, tariffs represent a threat to their cost of living, by potentially jacking up the price of just about everything. But to large corporations, the arrangement is more straightforward: It’s basically a ransom demand. In theory, tariffs apply to everyone in a given sector, but the government can issue exemptions. Who gets exemptions? Who do you think? A recent study in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis found a correlation between political support and the granting of tariff exemptions—and conversely, that companies that had politically opposed the administration were more likely to have their requests denied.
There is no shortage of cowardice at work here, from people with no compunction about wielding power against workers or rivals. For Trump’s strategy to work, it requires a lot of people who do have agency choosing not to use it. But America’s titans of industry, no stranger to dealmaking and negotiation, have demonstrated with their checkbooks and fawning statements a clear-eyed recognition of the new rules. They’d rather not find out what happens to people who don’t pay up.
