andrei, on 2019-January-14, 10:42, said:
I have been wondering about something myself. Here are two situations:
1. The Dems now control the House, and we are hearing that the Dems must negotiate with Trump Well, Nancy and Chuck must negotiate, presumably with Don.
2. We have repeatedly been told, by Trump supporters going back to the summer of 2016, that we should not get too focused on the exact words that Trump says.
So here is the question:
How do you negotiate with someone if you are not to focus on what he says?
This style of his was one of my strong objections to Trump in 2016 and it remains a strong objection.
A recent example: Not long ago Trump tweeted about Syria. From me to Erdogan, including just about everyone in between, we understood him to be saying that soon we would be out of Syria and Turkey could do as it pleased regarding the Syrian Kurds. Erdogan understood it this way, so did the Kurds, and so did just about everyone else. .Then John Bolton announced a policy that appeared to everyone to be quite different. Then Trump said something like "Yeah, that's just I said". Uh huh. Of course we could say that the Kurds and Erdogan and I and everyone are just too dumb to understand the clarity of what Trump was saying but this seems to happen over and over. I have never read The Art of the Deal, never watched The Apprentice either, but I understand that Trump regards keeping people off balance as a really good negotiating tactic. Perhaps so, providing you are negotiating with someone who mistakenly trusts what you say, but what works in the Real Estate and Casino business might not work so well on the world stage.
So the question is: How do you negotiate with a person whose words are not to be taken seriously? Why would anyone even try? You just end up with egg on your face. It was really clever of Trump to invite the cameras in to a supposedly private meeting, have the setting so that the camera is facing him, the camera behind Pelosi and Schumer, call them Chuck and Nancy while they call him Mister President, very clever, but probably not the way to encourage negotiation. But very clever. Clever works for a while. It seems to be wearing thin, and not just with me.