Negotiate Over What?
By DePetris’s post encapsulates the problem with The Discourse, which is getting worse as we all continue to pretend.
News stories are written this way because the doddering old fool in the White House clings to the fiction that he once was a maker of deals, a negotiator. But he ever was a fool and thinks that browbeating and brutalizing is negotiation, as it must be when your theory of interaction is strictly win-lose.
Negotiation with Harvard? Drop the demands until a New York Times story irritates you, and then demand $1 billion!
Negotiate tariffs? Nay, just haul the board out with your demands. They’re handy also at random moments of anger.
Negotiate a peace in Gaza? Gentlemen shake hands all around, and now it’s time to develop the resort.
The Greenland negotiations? Nothing seems to have been decided, but we’ll hear in the canonical two weeks.
Ukraine? If his real estate buddy can’t make the negotiation happen, fuggetaboutit.
Sometimes there is no objective, as seems to be the case in Cuba. He can’t take out Miguel Díaz-Canel as he did Nicolas Maduro and take the oil, because there isn’t any. Nobody knows what he wants to accomplish with his threats against Iran.
Just forcing people to pay obeisance in the styrofoamed Oval Office, as with President Gustavo Petro of Colombia this week, may be enough for him, or it may enflame his appetite for more.
Trump was never good at negotiations, only at menacing and threatening. As he deteriorates, he’s becoming less good at that. He’d be sat away in the back office if he didn’t have the military might of the US to flail around.
If we look at this from the viewpoint of Scott’s post, it make sense to others to keep this going, though. It produces noise and emotion to cover what Stephen Miller is doing.