The former president has been fortunate insofar as his supporters seem to tailor their expectations to match his frequently poor performance.
For someone who built a commercial brand around the notion that his skills as a negotiator are unmatched, what Donald Trump’s negotiating tactics have delivered leaves a lot to be desired. This is the once unmentionable truth Florida governor Ron DeSantis articulated in a recent interview with Radio Iowa following the former president’s comments to Meet the Press host Kristen Welker.
“Anytime he did a deal with Democrats, whether it was on budget, whether it was on the criminal-justice ‘First Step Act,’ they ended up taking him to the cleaners,” DeSantis said following the harsh judgments Trump reserved for Republicans alone on the subject of abortion. “I think if he’s going into this saying, he’s going to make the Democrats happy with respect to right to life, I think all pro-lifers should know that he’s preparing to sell you out.”
DeSantis is right, but Republican voters might be used to being sold out by Trump when he’s left to his own devices in closed-door negotiations with his Democratic counterparts. After all, they got their first taste of Trump’s eagerness to please Democratic leadership just eight months into the former president’s tenure in the White House.
“Donald Trump, who casts himself as a master negotiator, took the first offer Democrats put on the table,” Politico gloated in September 2017. If only the outlet didn’t have ample reason to celebrate. Amid the annual squabble over hiking the debt ceiling and funding the government — a complication compounded by the urgent need for disaster-relief funding for areas devastated by August’s Hurricane Harvey — Trump caved.
The former president abandoned the negotiating position struck by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and even overruled his own cabinet officials who sought an 18-month extension to the debt ceiling. Instead, he acquiesced to the Democrats’ desire for a short-term debt-ceiling hike, forcing Republicans to consent to another short-term debt-ceiling hike in the Christmas season and pushing a bruising financial showdown into the midterm-election year. “The move shocked everyone,” Politico noted, adding that “Democrats were gleeful.”
But that wasn’t all that Democrats got out of Trump in September 2017. “Democratic leaders on Wednesday night declared that they had a deal with President Trump to quickly extend protections for young undocumented immigrants and to finalize a border-security package that does not include the president’s proposed wall,” read the New York Times’ open-mouthed reaction to Trump’s capitulation on his signature issue. Indeed, the arguments Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi deployed to persuade the president were apparently so convincing that Trump himself retailed them shortly after their productive meeting.
It was only after the Democratic leaders Trump affectionally referred to as “Chuck and Nancy” performed a victory dance that the former president appeared to recognize the scale of his folly. “No deal was made last night on DACA,” Trump tweeted angrily. “Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent. Would be subject to vote.” But the Trump White House confirmed that the Democratic Party’s minority leadership had the terms of the deal correct. “The wall will come later,” Trump eventually admitted.
Trump has been fortunate insofar as his supporters seemed to tailor their expectations of the former president to match the poor performance he so often turned in. Perhaps that dynamic pertains to this day, in which case DeSantis can talk until he’s blue in the face to no avail. But if Republican voters can be persuaded to stand up in defense of their own interests, DeSantis’s unimpeachable observation might prove compelling.