Trump’s Art of the Deal

For Trump, everything — from NATO membership to foreign invasions — is about the transaction.

James Surowiecki
GEN

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Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

After calling Vladimir Putin a “genius” and “smart” last week, Donald Trump seems to have recognized that the political winds have shifted, and that praising the tyrant who just invaded his neighbor isn’t the best look at the moment. So Trump has pivoted (without, of course, admitting that’s what he’s done), and is now framing himself as a defender of Ukraine and one of the reasons it’s been able to put up a tougher fight than many — including Putin himself, apparently — expected. In a statement released today, Trump not only took credit for arming the Ukrainians with Javelin anti-tank missiles (something he did do, albeit only after holding up aid in order to try to get Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe Biden), but also made the more audacious, not to say ridiculous, claim that without him, NATO would no longer exist. “There would be no NATO if I didn’t act strongly and swiftly,” Trump wrote.

Now, of all Trump’s many lies, this ranks near the top, given that in 2018 he told people in his administration that he wanted to pull out of NATO, which he saw as a pointless drain on US resources. But the more revealing line in Trump’s statement was his explanation for how he saved NATO, namely that he “got delinquent NATO…

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James Surowiecki
GEN
Writer for

I’m the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. I’ve been a business columnist for Slate and The New Yorker and written for a wide range of other publications.