this part, we will analyze how Trump has consistently implemented our science-based strategic framework—my Five Golden Rules of Negotiation—in his almost 50 years of negotiating business deals.
We will do it by identifying and evaluating Trump’s Top Ten Business Negotiation Strategies in Chapters 1 through 10.
The Five Golden Rules of Negotiation
1 Information Is Power—So Get It!
2 Maximize Your Leverage
3 Employ “Fair” Objective Criteria
4 Design an Offer-Concession Strategy
5 Control the Agenda
Trump’s Personal Skills and Ethics
What you do in a negotiation—the moves you make—differ from how you do it—the way you implement them. Negotiation strategies (part one) differ from skills (part two). Of course, these interrelate. You cannot draw a bright line between them. But they do represent distinct elements of a person’s negotiation approach. We thus address them separately.
Style-wise, the research points to certain identifiable skills that characterize effective negotiators, including assertiveness, empathy, flexibility, ethicality, and social intuition.
How does Trump stack up?
What about Trump’s ethics? Few issues engender more passion than Trump’s truthfulness and credibility. Trump lovers point to his blunt, unvarnished, non-PC talk.
Trump haters point to his effort to delegitimize President Barack Obama with the birther conspiracy and his false and unsupported campaign and presidential statements reported by publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times.
How will we evaluate Trump’s credibility? By identifying his credibility-related tactics and assessing his reputation developed over almost 50 years of deal-making.
The Trump Transition—Business to Presidential Negotiations
Will Donald Trump’s business negotiation skills stand him in good stead in presidential negotiations? Business and presidential negotiations require different skills and strategies and present almost diametrically opposed challenges. What’s different? Will Trump be able to pivot and stretch his negotiation skills into a foreign negotiation environment? After all, he did not pivot in the campaign, and he won. And if he doesn’t pivot, how might his political paradigm shift, business negotiation style and strategies impact his foreign and domestic negotiations?
To truly judge Donald Trump’s negotiation skills, we must objectively analyze his major negotiations in business and as President. We do this here by evaluating his Mexico border wall funding negotiation and his congressional health care reform negotiations.
One final note. We shouldn’t set up an impossible standard and then judge Trump based on it. That would be unfair to him, unwise analytically, and counterproductive. While the best negotiators implement most of these strategies, no one adheres to all of them all the time. Even the best of the best make mistakes. However, the most effective negotiators learn and improve as they gain experience and expertise. We will evaluate this in Trump as well.
Donald J. Trump styles himself as the dealmaker president. Let’s evaluate his skills and his deals based on the experts’ proven research.
TRUMP’S TOP 10 BUSINESS NEGOTIATION STRATEGIES
“I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win. Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.” 4
—Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal
Donald Trump started negotiating business deals almost 50 years ago in his early twenties. Named president of various Trump entities by his father, Fred, he negotiated leases and repair contracts for thousands of apartments in Trump-owned buildings.
Since then, Trump has negotiated in a wide variety of business contexts and with highly diverse counterparts. He considers negotiation part of his DNA, tweeting, “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” 5
He’s had massive successes and failures. What negotiation strategies and tactics has he consistently used? Donald Trump’s top ten most common strategies and tactics constitute the first ten chapters of this book.
To start, some preliminary notes:
Different Strategies Work in Different Environments. Sometimes the most effective negotiation strategy is to build the relationship. Other times an extremely aggressive approach works better. We will analyze Trump’s strategies in both contexts.
Trump’s Credibility Will Be Addressed Later. Trust, credibility, truthfulness, and parties’ reputations impact every negotiation. Some strategies involve bluffing, puffery, exaggeration, promises, threats, and other credibility-related moves. While we describe these here, chapter 12 extensively addresses their impact and effectiveness.
Trump Is Not a “One-Trick Pony.” Donald Trump uses more than these next ten strategies. However, these ten consistently pop up in his negotiations. They have likely become habits—so he will almost certainly continue to use them as President.
The Top Ten Order Is Based on the Five Golden Rules of Negotiation. Finally, the sequence here is not based on how often Trump uses these strategies, the order in which he implemented them, or their priority or power. Instead, they are organized around my Five Golden Rules of Negotiation, a strategic framework that describes the basic building blocks of the experts’ proven research.
Okay, here’s my Five Golden Rules structure and a short description of how Trump’s Top Ten Business Negotiation Strategies fit within them.
Golden Rule One: Information Is Power—So Get It!
The first thing to do in any negotiation is get sufficient information to set your goals. You cannot negotiate strategically based on the experts’ proven research without knowing where you want to end up and defining “success” at the end of the day.
In chapter one, we will evaluate a) how much Trump negotiates instinctively versus strategically and b) how and how much he prepares. These issues infuse the entire Trump approach to negotiations. We will shift in chapter two to exploring how his incredibly aggressive goal-setting and passionate expectations impact his deals.
Puffery and the role of “truthful hyperbole” will be addressed in chapter three. Trump exaggerates a lot. Does it work? Trump also regularly used the carrot-and-stick approach in his business negotiations.
