Dealmaker Don v. Tariff Man Trump

0:01NPR.

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Waylon Wong. Throughout President Donald Trump's career, he's held all kinds of positions on taxes and social issues. One constant, though, has been tariffs. He talked about tariffs a lot during his campaign, so it wasn't surprising that he followed through on tariffs as president. What was surprising to the world was the scale of those tariffs announced in early April. Global markets plummeted. And the fundamental question everyone's trying to understand is, are the tariffs a bargaining chip or are they here permanently? Is the president dealmaker Don or tariff man Trump?

0:51Inside the president is two wolves. We go all the way back to Trump's childhood to try to figure out which one's in charge. My conversation with the Trump biographer after the break. This message comes from NPR sponsor Capella University. Sometimes it takes a different approach to pursue your goals. Capella is an online university accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. That means you can earn your degree from wherever you are and be confident your education is relevant, recognized, and respected. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more about earning a relevant degree at capella.edu.

1:30Support for this podcast and the following message come from Recorded Future. Every day, millions of cyber threats compete for attention, but only a few truly matter to your business. As a leading threat intelligence company, Recorded Future cuts through the noise with precision intelligence. That's why top banks and governments trust them. Because security leaders don't just react. They foresee spotting the signals that others miss and acting before threats become setbacks. Recorded Future. Know what matters. Act first. Washington Post journalist Mark Fisher co-wrote a biography of Donald Trump.

2:07So we hoped he could help us figure out that fundamental question. Were we seeing dealmaker Don with tariffs simply being a bargaining chip? Or are we seeing tariffman Trump, someone who wants tariffs here to stay? Okay, so dealmaker Don and tariff lover Don, they're both the same guy. The answer is yes to both and no to both. And that's not the way he thinks about things. And that is the way he thinks about things. Okay. This is an enigma wrapped in a riddle with a mystery involved. Except that he's actually a very simple person. And if you look at these issues, not as an economist, not as a journalist, But as a guy who trusts his gut, knows very little, studies not at all, and is averse to taking advice from almost everyone, and who wants to just win on every occasion, then you start to see a different kind of reasoning.

3:12So first, let's hear the argument in favor of Dealmaker Don. If this archetype is winning, a lot of the tariffs may soon be lifted. Dealmaker Don is someone who has been around since his childhood. From his very early days, Donald wandered around Brooklyn and Queens with his father collecting rents. On Saturdays and Sundays, they would go door to door collecting rent from people who were maybe a little bit behind. And he heard his father cutting deals left and right. Donald also went around with his father to all the political clubs. And this was a room full of dealmakers. Fred Trump was somebody who could both give them something and who needed something from them.

3:57Fast forward a little bit to when he goes into business by himself and he runs into some trouble and he seeks the help of Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn, the famous New York fixer, brought to life last year in the biopic The Apprentice by actor Jeremy Strong. Roy Cohn's three rules of winning. The first rule is the simplest. Attack, attack, attack. Rule two. Admit nothing. Deny everything. Rule three. This is the most important rule of all. No matter what happens, no matter what they say about you, no matter how beaten you are, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Never admit defeat. So these kind of basic rules of Trump guided his way through what he saw as life is a battle and life is a series of deals and you either win them or you're a loser.

4:48So he has this checkered history of successes and failures, but what he learned to do is to always sell every one of those moments as a victory. And so dealmaker Don is someone who, by definition, cannot lose because he will always say that he won. Now, I want to go to tariff man Trump. What's the evidence that the tariffs might be here to stay because Trump, in his own words, is a tariff man? He became a tariff man back in the 1970s and 80s when the United States was suffering from a real trade deficit with Japan, especially in the auto industry. This was a time when the U.S. seemed to be losing out in so many areas of manufacturing, steel, cars.

5:41And so Donald Trump saw the U.S. as being humiliated around the world by these foreign competitors. And he thought that the way to get around that was by leveling tariffs on these countries. I just want to play a clip from an old interview. We should have a surplus, not a deficit. This is Donald Trump with Larry King in 1987. You can call it a tax. You can call it whatever you want to call it. But those countries should be paying us major billions of dollars and you won't have any deficits whatsoever. And then we'll be able to help the poor. And here's Trump speaking in early April of this year, announcing the huge global tariffs.

6:20Other nations got rich and powerful, much of it at our expense. But now it's our turn to prosper and in so doing use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt. And it'll all happen very quickly. What are your thoughts about those two clips? Same guy. Same guy many years later. Trump's way of thinking about the world, of thinking about political issues, is always grounded in the attitudes that he formed in his youth, in his early days as a developer. He's a man who very much pines for the America that once was, at least in his fantasy or his memory of his early years.

7:10And tariffs is one of those one-word solutions that he likes to latch onto. So what we've seen in recent weeks is this strange drama in which, on the one hand, he says, these are permanent tariffs. This is how we're going to turn our economy around. except that every time things get tough because of that, prices soar, stocks fall, foreign countries rebel, Trump backs away. So this is the clash of two essential core qualities of Donald Trump. Always make the deal, even if it means caving in, you can always just call it victory, doesn't matter whether it's a loss, versus we're gonna stand fast and do the tough things, which is how he won elections, by selling that idea.

7:59When I listen to these two clips, I hear a running thread that the U.S. is a victim, whether it's defense spending, trade deficits, government deficits, or private business interests. It's kind of this combined big ball of grievance. Absolutely. And so when his advisors go out and give all their conflicting explanations of why we're doing this, Are we doing this to make foreign goods more expensive so that we can build up our American manufacturing sector? Or are we doing this simply to punish other countries and establish American dominance around the world? Yes, all of those, but above all of those, he's just doing it because he needs to be in the spotlight, center stage every day.

8:51and there needs to be a new conflict every day so that he can then declare victory in that conflict. I think in most things, Trump is not to be found in political science or economics. Rather, it's to be found in psychology, in a study of the instincts that he has ridden all the way from Queens, New York to the White House. And Mark Fisher's not just talking from research. When he was writing that biography of Trump, Mark dealt firsthand with how Trump operates. We got to talking a little bit about how and why he sues people. And he said that he doesn't do it to win. He does it to destroy them.

9:34He said, if it's a bad book, I'm going to come after you. So I said, well, you already told us that you are not going to read the book. So how will you know if it's a bad book? And he said, people will tell me. The book Trump Revealed came out in 2016. Trump posted that it was bad, but maybe because he was distracted by his presidential campaign, there wasn't any lawsuit. Tomorrow, more answers to that fundamental question on whether the Trump tariffs are a negotiating tactic or here to stay. To do that, we'll take a closer look at how they're being explained by his advisers. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Kweisi Lee.

10:15It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Kate Concanon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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