Money and grotesque flattery: The art of doing a deal with Trump

Donald Trump boasts that he is the king of dealmakers.

His 1987 ghostwritten bestseller, The Art Of The Deal, turned the New York City nepo babe into a national figure. This in turn, led to him playing the boss in the TV show The Apprentice, and that became his calling card to becoming the president of the United States twice.

That, at least, is the view of men who bitterly regret giving Trump his leg-ups to the top. Tony Schwartz, the author who actually wrote The Art Of The Deal, now says it should have been called 'The Sociopath'.

After his Non Disclosure Agreement expired, Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first season of The Apprentice, when it was called Meet The Billionaire, confessed "he was not, by any stretch, a successful New York real estate tycoon like we made him out to be". John Miller, the chief marketing officer for NBC who was in charge of crafting Trump's TV image, admits "we created a monster".

He says Trump had a string of failures and bankruptcies behind him, but "people thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman". Nobody can take Trump's electoral successes away from him.

He has been elected president of the United States twice, most recently with a majority of the popular vote. Questions remain about the quality of his deal-making after the economic damage done around the world by his tariff plans, followed rapidly by his partial climbdown from them.

He is good at playing the big man for the cameras, but just how good a deal-maker is Donald Trump? And knowing what they know after the past 10 days, how should the 75 nations who Trump says are queuing up "to kiss my ass" negotiate with him? Trump's decision not to implement the big "reciprocal" tariffs he had announced against countries around the world brought relief. His closest advisers fanned out to insist that the rollercoaster ride he forced on the markets was all part of a cunning plan.

The president had always planned to go into reverse, they claimed, even though he had repeatedly said he would not in the days following his big tariff reveal in the White House Rose Garden. Trump's tariff climbdown, posted on his Truth Social platform, was one in the eye for the US trade secretary Howard Lubnick, who had being telling the world "there is no postponing, they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks".

Peter Navarro, the "brains" behind the tariff strategy, also had to eat his words but then he is a "moron" and "dumber than a sack of bricks.