From ‘The Art of the Deal’ to giving away Ukraine to Putin
President Trump’s supporters often argue that his strength is business acumen, developed outside the discredited and dysfunctional political arena. They present him as a bold, instinctive deal-maker, able to look beyond conventional wisdom and find pragmatic solutions to intractable problems.
Think of the 2020 Abraham Accords. Under Trump’s auspices, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed to establish normal diplomatic relations with Israel. Perhaps the great wheeler-dealer had started a new and positive phase in the region.
This image of a deal-maker is built on dubious foundations. Indeed, as Ukraine is discovering, to its cost, the president’s very notion of a “deal” can be hazy. Trump can be so fixated on reaching an agreement that any individual considerations can be thrown carelessly overboard. The flipside of Trump’s self-absorption is a lack of empathy, a vital quality for an effective negotiator.
Trump’s reputation stems from his 1987 business guide/memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” a bestseller that helped make him a household name. It is a sacred text for him, which he once named as his second favorite book after the Bible. But “The Art of the Deal,” both by its nature and what it represents, flatters to deceive.
The book carried Trump’s name and was attributed to “Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz.” Schwartz, a New York Magazine journalist, was hired to ghostwrite the book in 1985, an offer too lucrative to refuse. By 2019, he said it was the biggest regret of his life and referred to the royalties as “blood money.”
Schwartz claims that Trump contributed virtually nothing of substance to the text. Howard Kaminski, head of publisher Random House, laughed in agreement that “Donald Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!” Schwartz said that the book should be “recategorized ... as fiction.”
If a deal goes south, Trump quickly washes his hands of it. Trump blasted the fall of Kabul in August 2021 as “the most embarrassing moment in the history of the United States,” resulting directly from the weakness of the Biden administration. The truth is that the seeds of the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cost the lives of 13 American service members, had been sown in February 2020 by Trump and his advisers.
The deal the Trump administration cut with the Taliban at Doha was purely bilateral, negotiated over the heads of the Afghan government. It stipulated the withdrawal of U.S. forces by May 2021 and the end of economic sanctions against the Taliban. In short, it offered what Trump wanted — a way out of the 20-year military campaign in Afghanistan — and ignored inconvenient realities on the ground, hoping for the best.
In negotiating over Ukraine, Trump is cutting out the government in Kyiv because he sees Vladimir Putin as an easier gateway to what he wants. The opening negotiations between the U.S. and Russia have not been marked by erratic judgment, as bargaining chips have been given away for free.
Before talks had even begun in earnest, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth effectively ruled out Ukraine joining NATO; Trump hinted strongly that Russia is not expected to give up the territory it currently holds in Ukraine; and American officials have given themselves a needlessly challenging deadline by saying they hope to achieve a settlement by Easter.
These represent some of Putin’s main objectives in going to war, but Trump has conceded them because they seem at first glance of no value to him or the U.S. He is also clearly motivated by an intense dislike of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Dismissing Zelensky as a “dictator” who has four percent approval ratings at home — there is no evidence for this — Trump made his most breathtakingly false charge in blaming Ukraine for the war. “This could have been settled very easily,” he said. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Trump likes Putin and dislikes Zelensky. He had no stake in the causes of the Ukraine war, and fetishizes “the deal”; as a result, it is incomprehensible to him that Ukraine has resisted Russia for three blood-soaked years. That Putin might emerge from the war with his aggression rewarded is simply inevitable in Trump’s mental ecosystem of strongmen, winners and losers.
Let there be no doubt: If the war ends on the terms the U.S. has already conceded, it will be a smashing foreign policy success for Putin.
Has Putin read the Russian-language version of “The Art of the Deal”? He will already have judged that he is not facing an opponent of subtle genius, nor one who understands the mindset of others. He may recall Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran, which many observers argue allowed Iran to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. Or the emptiness of Trump’s engagement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who recently sent combat troops to fight with Russia in Ukraine.
A former colonel in the KGB comfortably overmatches an impulsive real estate developer who played a caricature of himself on “The Apprentice.” Trump places no value on Ukraine save for what he can extract. Simplistically, he wants the war to be over, whatever the cost.
That cost may be paid by Ukraine at first, but there will be long-term consequences of the demonstration that military aggression works. Maybe we should call that Trump’s “new deal.”
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
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