Donald Trump assured us repeatedly during the campaign that he would use his unparalleled negotiating skills to liberate us from the innumerable bad deals struck by previous administrations with the rest of the world. Given that he was completely unfamiliar with the foreign leaders in question and the issues, and had actually collaborated on a book laying out his favorite negotiating tactics for the whole world to see, this was clearly implausible from the beginning, but, like the unscrupulous salesman he is, he managed to get the public to buy into it.
Naturally, things aren’t working out as planned. He has already essentially agreed to make America the tip of the Saudi spear against Iran in response to some clever flattery and a promise to buy American weapons. In addition, he has naively placed his hopes of imposing a nuclear agreement on North Korea on Xi, who is almost certainly going to string him along with promises and token gestures in exchange for real substantive concessions from the US. Even some members of his hapless administration are said in today’s NYT to be concerned about this.
And so, the driving force behind Trump University is taking a graduate course himself at Xi University. What’s next? A tutorial on fake news at the Putin School of Journalism.