I'm curious how this works over time. I read somewhere (would have to search to find it) that after Trump became notorious for stiffing small contractors on his properties, the wisdom them became you just quoted a ~50% premium, because you knew Trump would only pay you 2/3 of what he originally said he would.
But agree with your statement, which is why I always gag a little when I see working class people lionize these two as "champions of the working man".
Trump believes there is a winner and loser in everything. So you stiff the contractor, he gets upset and might not work with you again, you just get another contractor. Trump was a big enough name and has enough money that even if his reputation is horrible, people aren't just going to not work with him. You can imagine that how works on a global scale as president.
> Trump believes there is a winner and loser in everything.
This, precisely. It's Fred Trump's mantra, inherited.
It's also bound up with his malignant narcissism; no deal is ever closed, it can always be renegotiated and he can always decide it was bad for him even when it was his deal.
People did refuse to work with him, though I am sure the rest came to realise you overbilled so you got paid at all.
And he made some hilariously bad deals when he was desperate (the ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal got comically good terms because Trump was so desperate to have a book).
Famously his lawyers would only meet with him in pairs. He is that untrustworthy.
All of this factors into how the tariff deals are going; any diplomatic department anywhere in the world understands all of this.
> All of this factors into how the tariff deals are going; any diplomatic department anywhere in the world understands all of this.
NYTimes (I think it was) just had an article that talked about how these other countries made these outlandish commitments to buy way more gas from the US than they'd ever need, or make insane amounts of investments in the US that they would never need to do, but the agreements were "light on implementation details". That shit is never going to happen.