In my last posting, I wrote Trump Doesn’t Understand Game Theory, and I used the current debate in Congress over a disaster relief bill as my example. There were four main critiques of his negotiating style. One was that he doesn’t utilize all the information that is available to him. Another was that he doesn’t closely examine the incentives of other players. The third was that he often operates solo when he is engaged in team activity, like a selfish basketball player more concerned about scoring points than winning games. And the final one was that he cares more about how he perceived by his base than about getting results.
We can see all of this elements in how Trump handled the government shutdown. Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer have an article in Politico that goes into some depth on how the shutdown came about, and there’s a section of it where Trump is having conversations with then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
For context, these episodes took place in the lame-duck session of Congress, after the GOP had lost control of the House in the midterms but before they actually had to relinquish their power. The Senate, in coordination with the White House, had already passed a bill to keep the government open, and they had done it with an unrecorded and unanimous voice-vote. Yet, after the Senate bill passed, a lot of people on the right began criticizing the president for giving up on his border wall. Trump was particularly incensed by the slings and arrows he was taking on Fox News. He called Paul Ryan to tell him that he wasn’t happy and was going to back out of the deal he had made with him to sign the funding bill.
Then Ryan got a call from Trump himself and heard the bad news straight from the president’s mouth: Trump told Ryan he was getting beat up on cable television, didn’t like it and was turning against the spending plan.
Ryan had little patience for this type of bullshit. You always suffered somewhere for making big decisions. Ryan had been a darling of the right wing before he became speaker and gave that up when he got into leadership. That’s just what leaders do, Ryan thought. You take the flak and move on. Trump, in Ryan’s view, was never able to do that.
“That’s how this always works,” Ryan told the president. He explained that a compromise bill to keep the government open would, indeed, anger the talkers on Fox News, but they would eventually get over it. The speaker tried to explain to Trump that a shutdown was not in his interest, but he wasn’t making much progress. “There’s no endgame,” Ryan said of shutting down the government. “You’ll just help the Democrats.”
“OK,” Trump said. “Let’s just talk in the morning.” Ryan hung up the phone feeling a bit better.
Here we see the President responding to criticism from his base. We see Paul Ryan asking for a strategy–some theory of the game he’s being asked to play–and getting nothing in response. The next morning, the House Republicans held a meeting. Ryan and his then-deputy, Kevin McCarthy, wanted to convince at least half of their caucus to vote for the Senate bill because that would allow them to avoid violating the Hastert Rule. It was clear however, that the president and members of the Freedom Caucus had teamed up against them and now they had a mutiny on their hands.
As his fellow Republicans raged, Ryan’s phone rang. It was the president. Ryan stepped out of the meeting and into a small office next to the party’s Capitol meeting room to take the call. It was as if his conversation with Trump from the night before had picked up exactly where it left off: Trump was once again telling Ryan that he was getting killed on television.
Again? Ryan was pissed. He knew that [Rep. Mark] Meadows had gotten to the president. Look, he told Trump, “this is some Fox News people, this is some Freedom Caucus guys and that’s it.” Ryan wanted Trump to see that the opposition was limited. “What’s your endgame?” Ryan quizzed him once again. “How do you get out of this? It’s like you’re shooting yourself in the foot.”
Paul Ryan was doing the normal thing and wondering how shutting down the government was going to get the president what he wanted. He did not understand what he was being asked to do because it would not result in victory or success. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that Trump was less concerned about winning than avoiding the criticism he was seeing on his television.
Trump could have sought some advice. He could have asked Ryan to come up with a strategy that would divide the Democrats and assure that they got the greater half of the blame for the government shutdown. But he doesn’t think about the incentives of the people he’s trying to manipulate. As I said in the prior piece, if his position is strong enough relative to his opponent, he can prevail simply by bullying them, but he doesn’t do well on a more even playing field.
So, Trump made a decision to shut down the government until the Democrats gave him what he wanted, but he had no plan for getting the Democrats to change their position. And it wasn’t just a failure to come up with a strategy that was a problem. Trump didn’t get that he ought to have one. He didn’t know that there were no strategies that would work because he didn’t examine the incentives of the players. Finally, he made the mistake of creating a distinction between his goals and the Republican lawmakers’ incentives. By not taking their needs into consideration, Trump assured that the congresspeople would eventually turn on him and compel him to back down.
Trump makes these mistakes repeatedly, and it definitely drives the Republican leadership crazy. Just last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had to tell the president that he was not going to work on writing a replacement for Obamacare despite Trump’s promise to the nation that he would do so. McConnell wasn’t interested because he knows that Nancy Pelosi controls the House and that he can’t force her to do a damn thing. Writing a big health care bill would divide his caucus and demonstrate (again) their inability to replace the Affordable Care Act. It would be a giant and self-injurious waste of his time.
We can see Trump’s failure as a negotiator anywhere we care to look. It’s most consequential in foreign affairs, particularly on the negotiations over denuclearization with North Korea, but also with Iran and with our trade negotiations with China. He doesn’t succeed because he doesn’t understand how to do the basics. You want all the information you can get. You need to know the rules and the motives of every player and all their possible moves. You need to give people a reason to do what you want, and if they have no such reasons then you have to create them. You need to understand whether you’re playing one-on-one or in a team game.
Paul Ryan must be relieved that he doesn’t have to work with Trump anymore.
True, Trump is a terrible negotiator, but THIS is also manifestly false:
As Trump is demonstrating, he can hold power by pleasing his base even if the rest of the country hates him. If only his base were large enough we have no chance of defeating him.
If Obama played to HIS base and built up a loyalty like Trump has done, it wouldn’t matter a damn whether Republicans cooperated or not. Every election would be like 1936 in which Republicans railed against Roosevelt’s “dictatorial overreach” – but he won a massive landslide because people saw that he was fighting for things they believed in and wanted.
And he won this victory DESPITE the fact that Conservatives on the S.Ct. and in Congress largely blocked and overturned his New Deal initiatives, which meant that he was unable to “solve” the terrible problems of the Great Depression.
In a deeply divided country where people just flat don’t agree on what direction the country should go, there’s zero percentage in seeking compromise, or doing things by half-measures. And there is a lot more incentive to simply take a strong stance, politicize that stance and defy the opposition. Then when you are blocked – demand more power to overcome the opposition.
That has worked for Republicans for decades. They have even been able to gain power despite the fact that what they want is ultimately wildly unpopular and stupid, even impossible like eliminating the 14th Amendment and revoking the citizenship of Blacks and Latinos and “sending them back!” to wherever right-wingers think they belong – Kenya perhaps.
What is infuriating is that what liberals want is extremely popular, but hardly anybody thinks they are serious about fighting for it because once in power they act like milk toasts who constantly cave in and back down and compromise with themselves. It’s always a circular firing squad.
We are in a new political era where moderation simply doesn’t pay any real or lasting dividends. And THAT is the ultimate legacy of the Obama administration.
He tried to be the President of “all Americans” and the result was his party was wiped out in elections and we got Donald Trump.
President Obama and his 111th Congress’ signature legislative accomplishments were accomplished with zero Republican Party votes. Seems to me they weren’t TOO worried about needing to be bipartisan in all circumstances.
With Senator Franken’s delayed seating, Senator Kennedy’s death and the loss of his Congressional seat in the special election which seated Senator Brown, the Democrats only had a filibuster-proof Senate for nine months of the two year term.
Then the voters chose to take their majorities entirely.
I believe a prime reason for the 2010 electoral outcomes was that the signature legislative accomplishment of the 111th Congress and the first African-American President was one which disproportionately helped Americans of color, making it ripe for race-coded demagoguery at a time of still-high unemployment and devastating loss of wealth and social status for many white Americans. We can deduce that helping black and brown people in this way was part of what built the rise of the Tea Party and Trump movement, but I find that an acceptable price for what was necessary and right.
One of the things which was necessary for President Roosevelt to hold together the coalition which allowed him to stay in office and sustain New Deal policies was that those policies were most often explicitly racist in both their form and execution. Many of the people who “…saw that (Roosevelt) was fighting for things they believed in and wanted…” were the KKK and others who were enthusiastic or accepting of their massively racist and patriarchic societies:
…In the mid-30s, the NAACP persuaded Democratic Senators Robert Wagner and Edward Costigan to sponsor an anti-lynching bill. The legislation couldn’t survive without the president’s support, so Eleanor arranged a meeting with White and FDR to try to convince the president to endorse it. The meeting didn’t go well.
“Somebody’s been priming you. Was it my wife?” FDR asked in annoyance after White presented his case. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, [southern Democrats] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.”…
It’s frustrating how frequently we see hagiographical treatments of FDR by modern progressives, and how frequently we see an unwillingness by modern progressives to consider who the Democratic Party happily accepted in their dominant coalition from the 1930’s through the 1960’s.
And as a brown guy I have often wondered if I’d be in a better place if the democrats had adopted trickle down social policies but been able to wield the white majority against big business and corruption.
I wish voters cared more about attacking big business and corruption. But they elected the wealthiest and most openly corrupt Presidential candidate we’ve ever seen. It doesn’t appear the voters care enough about what you and I agree they should care about. Maybe they will care more about these things moving forward. I certainly hope so.
Roosevelt and his Administration hardly put any bankers in jail, even though the Great Depression was much, much worse than our financial crash. The voters didn’t punish him and his Congressional majorities and pull the plug on the New Deal. The Roosevelt-era Democratic Party coalition was different. I don’t want my Party to return to that coalition. Fuck that coalition.
There came a time in America when separate but equal became a moral abomination and had to go. I am proud Kennedy and Johnson took us past it. There was simply no other way forward.
President Truman really got the ball rolling on doing away with Plessy v. Ferguson America by desegregating the armed forces. That action, taken against massive opposition by Congress and the American people, was a primary factor in the extremely low approval rates Truman was saddled with during his Presidency.
Truman also nominated and was successful in placing multiple members of the Supreme Court which made the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and considered other groundbreaking civil rights cases.
Oh, the ridiculousness of applying the race standards of one age against another. FDR’s Democratic party was largely a Southern party and more than half of it was explicitly racist, and remained that way through the 1960s, till all the white working class Southern Democrats switched to Richard Nixon the minute Lyndon Johnson tried to apply the Great Society to Negroes. That provided the Republicans the dominant majority they kept right up till the election of Bill Clinton.
The modern Democratic coalition bears no direct relationship to the working class white Southern power block of the 1930s. Obama won with basically the same coalition of unionized workers (mostly in the North because the South bitterly resisted unionization for racist reasons), college educated, women, minorities, under 30s voters and urban dwellers that drew about 35% for McGovern in 1972. The electorate changed.
So, now the Democratic party can afford to be non-racist in its progressive values, because it does not depend for its support on white social conservative working class men.
It’s still difficult because in many areas of the country, racism trumps every other issue, as Trump proved in 2016.
Obama didn’t explicitly embrace an industrial policy of creating decent paying jobs as his #1 priority, and instead wasted his time trying to craft a bi-partisan health care bill, a hopeless tilting at windmills ensued.
Trump blamed all their economic woes of capitalism on minorities, uppity women and other “undeserving” outsiders taking their jobs.
Essentially fascism. And it worked. As it ALWAYS worked throughout the entire history of the 20th century whenever there wasn’t a strong and united enough leftist party capable of garnering enough working class support to overcome the effects of racism. White workers will always turn to fascism in the absence of any real alternative that going to fundamentally change the system. And Obama and Hillary were spokesmen for how the system “wasn’t so bad.” That didn’t work very well in 2016.
Whatever his legislative accomplishments, these did absolutely nothing to rebuild and strengthen the party. While he was president the Democratic party was basically out organized and crushed nationwide at almost every level. Only in 2018 have Democrats been able to make a counter-attack, and as the recent results in Wisconsin judicial election show, that is by no means a decisive advantage. The Republicans could still mount a come-back in 2020, and Trump could win Wisconsin, and probably the election if he does. It’s all still largely up in the air.
All because Obama stupidly tried to be the “post-partisan” president instead of maximizing his partisan advantage through party throwing his energies into building the party at the state and local level.
The GOP never makes that mistake. Trump spends all his time focusing on creating the intense loyalty of his base. Even though they are fewer in number, that unity helps them win.
I think you’re underestimating how much having the first African-American President as the leader of the Party, and the opposition Party’s complete willingness to dive into maximalist oppositional strategies/tactics, white supremacy and post-truth rhetoric had to do with the bad electoral outcomes.
I simply disagree with the inference that Obama and the Democrats would have won more elections if they would have somehow been able to pass more maximally progressive policies. President Obama and his 111th Congress had a larger and deeper set of progressive policy accomplishments than any Congress in our lifetimes, but people rejected that President and Congress at the ballot box.
I wish that policies, and the public’s ability to accurately assess and judge policy outcomes, were effective in predicting future electoral results. But hell, we’re here in a progressive community which is much better informed than the broad general electorate, and the level of ignorance here of the accomplishments made in 2009 and 2010 is quite substantial, as is the desire of this community to blame President Obama for all bad outcomes during his terms.
It seems to me that desire to cast blame away from ourselves is irresponsible, careless and misplaced. The voters are to blame, voters across the ideological spectrum. Too many so-called progressives thought the way to move our movement forward was to deny their votes and encourage others to deny their votes for Hillary Clinton and other Democratic Party candidates in 2016. What a blunder.
I think the GFC and Obama’s reaction to it had some impact on voter attitudes and the loss of the house in 2010. A part of that was the ACA which was half way to where it should have gone and was not actually implemented until 2014.
Meanwhile the financial crash continued to harm people, with loss of savings, homes and jobs. How many bankers suffered during this time? I recall bailouts to the tune of $16T,one report up to $24T. I agree they had to be bailed out but in your middle class hamlet the bailout of the elite didn’t play well. Certainly racism played into it. But the truth is more could have been done for the middle class.
And, now we have a guy with a motto to ‘make America Great again’. Think about that and the unemployment rate for a few seconds when your uncle was out of work.
Move up to the last election and Obama is recognized as one of our great men. But the Clinton campaign then simply forgot to campaign in the Midwest. And it sure didn’t help she gave those speeches on Wall Street, to the elite. Who exactly is our base?
I am pleased the young rebels may save our bacon, quite possibly cause they don’t trust us to handle it. We will see. But there is no time for a victory lap.
An easy case can be made that “…more could have been done for the middle class….” by President Roosevelt and his massive Democratic Party Congressional majorities.
Why did American voters provide great and sustained support for candidates running under President Roosevelt’s Democratic Party banner during their highly imperfect responses to the Great Depression, and why did American voters largely reject candidates running under President Obama’s Democratic Party banner during their less imperfect responses to the Great Recession?
The national unemployment rate in December 1932 was 24%. The national unemployment rate in December 1933, near the end of the first year of FDR’s Presidency, was 25%. The national unemployment rate in December 1934 was 22%. The national unemployment rate in December 1935 was 20%. The national unemployment rate in December 1936, right after Roosevelt’s re-election, was 17%.
While this level of long-term agony was being experienced by Americans, there were extremely few Federal or State social welfare programs for them to gain sustenance until the Social Security Act of 1935. As originally passed, the Act provided nothing like its current set of broadly available unemployment and old age insurance programs. Many job classifications were not protected under the Act. It was a revolutionary Law which nevertheless needed improvements to become the highly comprehensive and extremely popular program it has become.
Like the ACA, the Act survived a vote of the Supreme Court which considered its constitutionality. The ACA is like the Act in that it would benefit from further amendments to improve the Law. The legislatively nihilistic Republican Party has become an effective roadblock to achieving the usual improvements in popular Laws which we have seen in the past. The voters have not given Democrats sufficient power to make those needed improvements.
President Obama and the 111th Congress pushed through responses to the financial crash which prevented the country from suffering anything close to this sort of long-term extreme agony. Their major policy and regulatory achievements benefited women and non-whites, unlike many of the New Deal policies. Unemployment insurance was extended longer than it has ever been extended in American history, and other social welfare programs were also temporarily strengthened. Eventually, taxes were raised on wealthy individuals and businesses to fund the ACA and other welfare programs, while taxes were cut for the lower and middle classes.
The Dominionist and corporatist leaders who manufactured the TEA Party backlash to our first African-American President and the Party he led have maintained control of the conservative movement and Republican Party. The TEA Party movement and its development into the Trump movement have each been highlighted by their explicit stokings of racial resentment and regressive cultural battles.
I agreee with Booman on these two excellent posts about strategy and negotiation, which focus on Trump not Obama. One of tthe crucial differences between tthe two men are their respective levels of laziness and ignorance. Obama was extremely well-informed and active and understood both strategy and how to use the levers of the federal government effectively. Trump, as we all know is the polar opposite.
But Obama started his administration with a really, really, bad economic hand (to continue Booman’s poker metaphor). He also had a bunch of Blue Dog Dems in his party who won in 2006 and 2008 (and some before then like the detestable Joe Lieberman). Thanks, in part, to Rahm Emmanuel, Obama didn’t sttart with a sharp communication and rallying message for his thrilled voters while the GOP had (and still has) a truly massive propaganda noise machine on all media, huge financial support for this machine and the deep historical racism that is a fundamental characteristic of this country. And, finally, the 100% implacable opposition of the GOP in Congress.
The GOP was responsible for the Great Recession (though Clinton’s stupid ending of Glass-Steagell also contributed) and, while Bush and the GOP got punished for that and Iraq they rallied again in 2010 and 2014 and Democratic voters simply stayed home. I don’t see how that is Obama’s fault. It’s easy for Truump to rally his base because human nature, unfortunately, is tribal and negative messages are really much easier to convey than complicated positive policy proposals and pleas for tolerance.
The point is we need a new electorate and I think we are slowly (perhps too slowly) getting one.
Re. this:
“Obama didn’t explicitly embrace an industrial policy of creating decent paying jobs as his #1 priority…”.
I’ll leave aside the following swipe at the ACA, which I’ve addressed elsewhere.
My view is that President Obama would have been better served embracing an policy of creating a broader set of decent paying jobs in ALL job sectors as a greater priority. Failing to pass any portion of the Employee Free Choice Act was a costly decision by the 111th Congress. But, more specifically, the obsession with industrial jobs expressed by many Americans across ideologies is downright weird.
Many service jobs are as difficult or more difficult than many manufacturing jobs. Industrial work is simply not deserving of across the board significantly higher compensation than service work. The main differences are that manufacturing jobs are more frequently are held by white men and more frequently enjoy the greater leverages of Union representation and collective bargaining.
We’ve allowed Labor laws to grow which effectively deny realistically actionable organizing rights for workers without a Union, a group which is disproportionately made up of women and non-whites. Even politically progressive Americans have grown comfortable with the concept of low-wage jobs. There’s no such thing as a low-wage job. It’s been a remarkably effective propaganda campaign by the oligarchs.
I’ll conclude by pointing out that it is politically difficult to pass laws meant to increase worker pay when unemployment is sky high, as it was when the Bush Presidency delivered the Great Recession and left it for Obama and Democrats to fix while Republicans aggressively monkey-wrenched their efforts.
I agree with almost all of your comment but right-to-work laws are ubiquitous across the South and they affect quite a lot of white male workers as well as workers of color and women, of course. However, white male working class people have been effectively conditioned by 300+ Years of a highly authoritarian plantation feudalism that affected not only people of color but also poor white people as well.
Right-to-work-for-less laws don’t outlaw Unions in the States which have them. They just defund Unions and makes it much more difficult for Unions to organize and thrive. The Unions in Nevada have managed to grow their power and maintain solidarity, activism and funding, despite their State’s right-to-work laws.
The Democratic base is not and was never people like us who support progressive economic policy. Feeding us red meat does nothing for Democratic electoral politics.
Trump doesn’t know how to negotiate!!!???
Yes he does, Booman…it’s just not the (popularly supposed) kind of “civilized” negotiation.
He negotiates like a gangster.
He learned his “negotiation” skills from Roy Cohn.
You know…like that other Teflon Don, John Gotti?
The only difference?
Really?
It’s a matter of scale.
Trump has a bigger army than Gotti.
And a much richer turf, as well.
However…
As above, so below.
He’ll get his comeuppance, too.
These motherfuckers?
On this scale?
It always catches up to them, eventually.
Evolution keeps on keepin’ on.
Hitler?
Stalin?
The rest?
It seems like none of them ever figure it out!!!
They’re just placeholders until evolution catches up.
Then the whole routine starts again.
You and me?
Our families, our loved ones, entire cultures?
Sometimes swept away in the gang wars.
But…in the end?
Evolution ain’t through with us yet.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
I hope you are right.
Me too, Racer X.
Me too.
AG
Flawlessly demonstrated, but it was quite clear from CEO Trump’s utterly failed bizness record that he didn’t understand Negotiation 101. Negotiating to him was simply refusing to pay some hapless small businessman or reckless banker who was foolish enough to do work or extend credit to Trumper. The Art of the Haircut, in other words. Yet the American rubes watched Trumper weekly on a braindead reality TV show and thought him an awesome figure of fabulous wealth, the fabled Celebrity Billionaire—which is the highest status one can obtain in our failed society.
As for political strategy, Der Trumper himself could not possibly have any insight into it whatsoever, because he is a complete neophyte and ignorant demagogue who knows absolutely nothing about enacting legislation or being a public servant in a democratic society. He is the most unqualified prez in history, so all he could reasonably do when (for example) this baffling budget crapola came up was rely on more experienced pols like Randian Ryan. And that sort of reliance is quite beyond a “stable genius” like Der Trumper because of his severe personality disorders and temperamental unfitness for the office.
(Of course even Der Trumper’s supporters admit he is morally unfit to hold office, but harassing non-whites and women of child-bearing age is what matters to a Trump supporter, and Trump has been able to wreak havoc with the lives of many helpless people.)
So Der Trumper had no record of success as a bizness “negotiator”, and no record whatsoever as a democratic public servant. This of course was seen as a decisive “plus” by The 46%, and their disastrous abdication as citizens cannot be waved away. After Trump there is no floor. That he is effectively incompetent and a lamebrain is not really of great concern to them, as can be seen by his rock-solid approval ratings.
Most recently, he demonstrated his narcissistic idiocy by saying during the IUEW conference that the electricians are all going to vote for him despite the fact that he is being sued by the electricians who worked on the Trump International Hotel in DC for $2 million for failure to pay them for their work.
Amazing!
Will say it again. The donald tried to treat Speaker Nancy like she was the tile guy for one of his buildings. Sign a contract for one amount and pay way less when the work completed. Then tie the the mess up in court where the tile guy would end up settling for less than the donald’s first offer. He went to meet Kim with his Trump Tower hat on. Made an offer to build a beach hotel for Kim’s nukes. Kim smiled politely and put his plan B into action. Mexico and England have quietly been talking trade. I would not be surprised if there is a no deal Breixt, Mexico starts exporting to England most of the stuff they export to us. Constant threats of tariffs and closing the boarder are pushing Mexico to find a more reliable trading partners. Mexico will not pay for the wall nor will they care if he shuts down the boarder.
Most likely, at this point, Parliament will agree to create a Customs Union with the EU. That way, they get out of most of the EU’s regs that they (or at least the “leavers”) don’t like but keep the Irish border open, which solves a lot of problems but we’ll see. We only have five days left, at this point get a deal with the EU.
Thanks, Booman. As always, interesting analysis.
It brought to mind (all memories guaranteed approximate) an old story from “Hardball” (the pretty good political memoir/drinking stories book by Chris Matthews, not the overheated cable TV shoutfest):
Sometime in the 1970s a Congressional conference committee was negotiating a reauthorization of the Clean Air Act. There was a provision in existing legislation that would end certain existing air pollution permits if the new bill didn’t become law.
Near the end of another grueling committee meeting, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI, chief House negotiator) shouted in exasperation across the table at Sen. Ed Muskie (D-ME, chief Senate negotiator), “Goddamit, Muskie! Don’t you realize that if we don’t get this bill done every auto plant in the country will be forced to shut down!”
Muskie leaned back in his chair and replied, “John, there are no auto plants in Maine.”