Before Donald Trump was President of the United States, he was a real-estate magnate in Manhattan who courted celebrity about as much as he courted the big deal. His negotiating style wasn’t prefaced on traditional give-and-take but rather on pummeling the other side into submission. “The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have,” Trump wrote in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal. “Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs.”
For a while, Trump’s strong-arm tactics worked after he ascended to the White House. After all, foreign leaders can’t just stick their heads in the sand when the most powerful person on the planet makes threats. More often than not, those on the receiving end of those threats offered Trump concessions in the hope he would take the worst-case scenario off the table.
Trump’s coercion paid him dividends in the first year of his second term. Mexico was hit with tariffs, forcing President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy 10,000 troops along the U.S.-Mexico border to put a dent in the northerly flow of migrants and fentanyl.
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