> 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.
Also people can get away with re-promising things already promised; this is how Trump was played by Mexico and Canada at the beginning of his term. They glowingly offered him things the USA had already been offered that he is ignorant of.
He has a tendency to agree with the last person he spoke to who was nice to him, and he's also extremely vulnerable to flattery generally. If someone is making him happy he doesn't much care what they are saying.
The EU "deal" has convinced Trump that things have been committed by the EU that they literally do not have the power to commit.
The right wing press in the UK, even, was like, "haha, EU suckers, we got a better deal than you". And it is true, we've done very well by blowing diplomatic smoke up his arse, offering him a second state visit, generally Mandelson-ing them all.
But right wing media still tends to believe he's a great dealmaker when he is actually not; they simply didn't notice that he'd been fobbed off with undeliverables. And that means he gets the coverage from them that he is looking for.