Richard Miniter

It is very counterintuitive, right?

And you may totally disagree with me, but it's worth considering this hypothesis.

If you don't have the time to read Art of the Deal, which actually he lays this out, right?

So the normal way politics or change in academia or change in the NGO world or change in the business world happens,

is some leader comes down from the mountain and says, I have a vision.

Here it is.

Here's, you know, my beautiful PowerPoints.

Here's my white papers.

Here's my positions.

Isn't it a glorious future?

Let's all work together towards this glorious future.

And he tries to get various constituencies to go along, makes a couple of compromises here and there, and eventually build something like a majority behind whatever that is.

And they do it.

And it's a long deliberative process.

That is not how Trump operates.

Trump thinks this is all a negotiation.

And a negotiation, no smart person starts the negotiation by saying what they want as the outcome, because they will not get that outcome.

If a woman tells you on a first date that she would like to be married and have a baby in six months

Most men would say no second date, right?

This is how real estate deals work, and that is a definitive crucible for understanding how Trump's thinking was shaped.