The Art Of The Deal

Donald Trump’s approach to leverage centers on a few ideas he developed long before politics, most clearly in his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.” The core principle is that leverage comes not just from what you have, but from what the other side believes you might do. Perception matters as much as reality. He has said plainly that he courts controversy because attention itself is a form of power.
Several things distinguish his approach from conventional negotiating theory.
He treats unpredictability as a resource. Most negotiators signal reliability to build trust. Trump does the opposite. By keeping adversaries uncertain about his next move, he forces them to hedge, which puts them on defense. He applied this in trade talks with China, pulling out of agreements or threatening tariffs in ways that kept counterparts off balance. The logic is that a predictable opponent is an easy opponent.
He also escalates first and negotiates second. Where most parties open with a reasonable position and work toward compromise, Trump tends to open with a maximalist demand, sometimes one that seems absurd, and then treats any concession as a win. Critics call this bad faith. Supporters call it anchoring. Either way, it shifts the midpoint of any eventual deal in his direction.
He personalizes leverage. Corporate and diplomatic negotiators usually separate the institutional relationship from the immediate dispute. Trump collapses that distinction. He makes deals feel personal, which raises the emotional stakes for the other side and can extract concessions that a purely rational actor would never give just to end the discomfort.
What makes this unusual is that most of these tactics carry serious long-term costs in traditional contexts: burned relationships, reputational damage, broken alliances. Trump seems to calculate that he operates in contexts where he can absorb those costs, or where the short-term win outweighs them, or where the other party simply has no good alternative to dealing with him anyway.