Looking at polling during the Trump era, researchers have discovered that many voters are misinformed regarding something important about the president. They actually believe he's a massively successful self-made billionaire. Trump's lifelong penchant for hype and the exposure he got with the scripted reality show "The Apprentice" convinced many people that he was a tremendously gifted businessman.
As the New York Times reported in its massive exposé of the Trump family business going back to the 1960s, Trump was a millionaire before he was out of diapers --- and his repeated failures in business were all because of his lack of business acumen. The researchers discovered that had they known about this, it would have changed the minds of a meaningful percentage of Trump voters.
He gets a 5% boost in public approval when people think he came from humble roots because they believe he has empathy toward people like them. But when people learn that isn't true there is a big shift:
[A]ttitudes toward Trump may be polarized along party lines, but this information does have noticeable and statistically significant effects on evaluations of Trump’s character. For Democrats, who already see Trump as lacking empathy, this information makes them think of him as even less empathetic. But among Republicans, the information is even more damning, reducing perceptions of empathy by more than 10 percentage points.
The effects on people's perceptions of his business acumen, which are actually fairly high in both parties, are also significant. When they find out that his daddy bailed him out his whole life, Republicans reduce their admiration for his skills by 9 points and Democrats by 6. These are small differences but considering how close the election was in 2016, it's something worth thinking about for 2020.
They didn't know that then. He claimed to be the best negotiator in the world. He must have said it a thousand times. He even paid a ghostwriter to write his original book "The Art of the Deal" and all the subsequent ghosted books about his alleged negotiating prowess. Just before he announced his run, he put it this way:
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.
I'm sure he preferred "big" deals but in the end all of his big deals were massive duds so he was reduced to getting his kicks making dozens and dozens of small deals, slapping his name on dicey condo developments and cheap consumer products for a few bucks to keep the cash flowing. He was smart enough to get his money up-front and when the products failed to sell, as they usually did, he and the family had already pocketed their profit.
Americans shouldn't have to refer to any of that in making a judgment about Trump's abilities today. We've seen him in action for two years now. And unsurprisingly, his particular expertise has turned out to be completely useless for a president. (He may have been able to put it to use with the illegal emoluments from businessmen seeking favors, but that's really not actually in the job description.) Despite his incessant bragging about non-existent accomplishments, so far we are seeing failure in the negotiating department of epic proportions.
He said it would be "easy" to end Obamacare and create a new and better health care plan virtually overnight. Clearly, that didn't happen. That negotiation was a train wreck. He promised to end the nuclear threat in North Korea and even staged a big phony pageant that showed to the world what a fool he is when it produced an empty agreement which he didn't seem to understand. He insisted that he could end the Israeli Palestinian conflict. He did "renegotiate NAFTA which all the experts say was just a waste of time that resulted in very little change for no good reason. His trade war has produced nothing but bad feelings and rotting crops. And, needless to say, his big promise to make Mexico pay for his wall is turning out to have been his Waterloo.
Even his immigration muse Ann Coulter said this week that it turns out his negotiating skill was "exaggerated."
“I’ve been advising the president..."
For @AnnCoulter, it doesn’t matter how or when the shutdown ends, so long as Trump keeps it about immigration and border security. She says he'll be "dead in the water if he doesn't build that wall." pic.twitter.com/f2HqUhoFsn
Trump doesn't seem to realize that simply demanding what he wants and then getting up and saying "bye-bye" when the other side doesn't immediately agree isn't actually negotiating. And he's shown more than once that his word is no good so nobody can trust him. Last year he had agreed to a very complex and difficult immigration deal in which both sides were able to win some priorities and he not only backed out after having agreed, he did it in a rude and dismissive fashion. This year he signed off on a Republican continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown and then cowered in the face of right wing media commentators like Coulter and reversed himself at the last minute. How do you make a deal with someone like this?
I must admit that I too gave him more credit for savvy than he has shown in this latest stand-off. I thought for sure he would take the available off-ramp and declare the emergency, thereby throwing the issue to the courts. His base would see him as a big hero taking matters into his own hands and the rest of the government could re-open. Sure, it would have set a bad precedent but since when does Trump care about such things?
It's fairly obvious that at this point it's as much about beating Nancy Pelosi as it is the wall. And he is outmatched there, I'm afraid. Pundits have taken to referring to her rescinding the invitation to give the State of the Union Address as some kind of PR move. But she knows Trump was looking forward to it so denying him his platform until he agrees to open the government is a pressure point. Trump's response was just petty retaliation with no other purpose.
The New York Times reported this week that he's taken to whining to his chief of staff, "we are getting crushed! Why can't we get a deal?" so it's pretty obvious he has no plan, no strategy or any idea how to get out of this mess.
The Democrats can't give in or this will be the only way he "negotiates" for the rest of his term. It would be a disaster. So, if he refuses to declare his bogus emergency and save face with Ann Coulter, it's going to be up to Mitch McConnell to bring him the bad news that he is going to have to call the vote and override his veto if necessary to get the government open again. So far, McConnell's been AWOL on the whole thing, but he may have to step up to get the Greatest Negotiator The World Has Ever Known out of his jam --- just like Trump's daddy always did .
