Donald Trump: as bad a negotiator as he is a businessman

President Trump has backed down and signed the appropriations bill containing COVID relief.

It's a pattern that he's repeated over and over: create an artificial and unnecessary crisis; posture; bluster; manufacture all manner of chaos in an apparent attempt to force his will upon reality- and then lose, backing down, giving in, and gaining absolutely nothing in the process.

He's a poor negotiator, just as he's a bad businessman and an incompetent administrator. He has only one talent: self-promotion. He should have called his book The Art of the Spiel.

He's managed to convince the gullible and information-poor otherwise. Some people don't believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears. They don't want to; after all, Mr. Trump's whole schtick tells people that what they want to believe is true really is. He ran as a shrewd businessman as if he were a self-made man rather than someone who inherited his wealth from his father and would be richer today if he'd merely invested his inheritance in the stock market. As a chief executive, his fecklessness was demonstrated long before he entered the Oval Office by his pattern of driving companies he's owned into bankruptcy.

People's anger in 2016 exceeded their caution. Despite all the warning signs being there in plain sight, a large enough minority of the American people voted for him in exactly the right places to get him elected president by a fluke of demographics. After four years of chaos, enough of us had gotten the message to deny him a second term, notwithstanding his psychological inability to accept having lost to Joe Biden fair and square.

42% of Americans said they still supported him after his grotesque performance in the first debate. 46.8% somehow actually voted for him last month. But a recent post-election poll shows that another 42% say that he'll go down in history as one of the worst presidents we've ever had.

As Abe said, you can fool some of the people some of the time...

His tantrum, after losing the election, has featured even more erratic behavior than before. It's featured bizarre and ludicrous stories of a massive conspiracy to cheat him out of a victory he supposedly earned "by a landslide" through the use of a huge network of rigged voting machines dreamed up by conspiracy theorist and lawyer Sidney Powell and shamelessly shilled by members of his legal team and other supporters who surely know better. A series of hopeless and totally insubstantial lawsuits followed. Egged on by Powell, Michael Flynn, and others of his crazier followers, he reportedly even raised the possibility of a military coup to keep himself in power at a White House meeting on Dec. 19 before the military shot the idea down. And once again, as with Chinese tariffs, the citizenship question on the census, the infamous wall that Mexico was going to pay for, and a host of other issues, the man who presents himself as an iron-willed leader and a master negotiator has bet heavily on his ability to strong-arm his way to success, lost, and had to back down.

By now, it should be no surprise. He's not only an incompetent businessman and a hopeless administrator. He's an absolute disaster as a negotiator.