For this thread, I’d like to talk about negotiation tactics and the being-released Trump budget (saving what any of us might think about any specific line items for a separate thread, or many threads).
Much has been said about Trump’s “negotiation skills”. Defenders of this budget might say “this is a clear negotiation tactic. He won’t get everything he wants, so he starts low.”
But to me, this comes across as the tourist who “negotiates” by walking into a carpet shop and offering $10 for a $1000 carpet. This reveals the tourist to be a complete rube, and the shopkeeper either laughs him out of the shop (which is what happened with the Continuing Resolution last month), or invites him in and ends up taking complete advantage of him.
By which I mean, would Trump do better getting more of what he wants by starting with a less radical budget? Or has he successfully shifted the window to get more of what he wants.
Starting off with a pretty radical change as an FY18 budget comes with some background. He made a pretty radical proposal for FY17. Congress basically ignored it, hammered out a deal, and sent him back a passed bill to sign. Trump tried to spin it like it was a big success for the administration. In doing so he reinforced the notion that he won’t even push back when Congress ignores him on appropriations.
I expect his negotiating strategy to work just as well this time.
I’ve posted about this before, but Trump is the worst negotiator ever. He uses stupid tactics like the time he and Paul Ryan pretended to walk away from the healthcare bill, only to find that the salesman didn’t follow them into the parking lot…
Even when people want to agree with him and to make a deal, they are frequently in a position where they can’t, simply because they’ll look like theyre knuckling under to a bully.
But more broadly- negotiation is about information. The party that has the most information has the advantage. To negotiate something like the healthcare bill, you should to know it backwards and forwards. That way you could find the inefficiencies and find the tweaks and grasp how the parts affect the whole…
Or if you’re negotiating to build a wall, it might help to have an awareness that there is a river in the way for like 800 miles.
I suspect he started to lose it it the mid-2000’s, around the time of the Steaks and Water and Universities and the disastrous Trump Soho ( probably no suprise that it’s not in Soho, it’s right by the Holland Tunnel entrance ramps which is cool if you like big trucks. And it’s built on a burial ground. And he thought he could sell “condos” in a building that’s not residentially zoned. And he had sleazy partners that he didn’t properly vet and he later tried to distance himself.
But I honestly think he’s held a largely ceremonial role in the Trump Organization for some time now, coming in for big signing ceremonies after the deals have been worked out by others. And his kids probably sweat even that out.
Yeah, it makes me less uneasy about whatever medicaid cut comes through. And, with that particular issue, it is personal, and the one thing that I’m worried I can’t weather.
I want a big blowback that keeps Medicaid from being touched, or maybe even expanded. Or at least for it to last long enough that I get recertified for this year, which would last me until 2019 at least.
It’s probably because Trump probably provided very little (if any) input on it, given that any federal budgeting plan is a very details-oriented process. This smells like it is almost entirely OMB Director Mulvaney’s planning, given that his and Ryan’s wet dream is to eventually abolish Medicaid, Medicare, privatize Social Security, and eventually do away with many farm subsidies.
There seems to be a notion in US politics that a “business man” is what is needed in the White House since they know how to run things efficiently.
Unfortunately that does not hold up.
Running a country is nothing like running a business.
Apples and oranges. Not comparable at all.
So, Trump (or any president) starting at some absurd extreme is not a negotiating tactic. It is retarded.
It would be a negotiating tactic if he had any chance of making it so…as he could as the head of a business…but that is not how politics works.
I would submit that the LAST person we want as president is a business man. Politics and business are not the same thing. They do not work the same way and the business man will, as Trump is showing, be unable to adapt to an environment where he can’t just get his way by fiat.
From the high level summary, it sounds like a pretty traditionally Republican budget of the sort one might write if he’s a true believer and has control over both branches of government.
Now, it may well be that most of the Republicans in congress aren’t actual true believers, but I suspect that they’ll have a hard time making any real argument against what is supposed to be fundamental to their most professed beliefs.
It might get diluted a little bit. But I wouldn’t view this as a low bid. It’s a sweet deal to encourage the base that they’re all real Republicans, trying to shrink government, force people to get a job, etc. after all. Whether it all makes sense or not, it’s good for votes.
The real budget, that congress comes up with, will probably water it down a bit. But with all the hell Trump and the AHCA has put them through, they’ll probably keep the bill pretty faithful, because otherwise they’ll have done nothing for their base since getting voted in, in 2018.
I agree completely- it makes about as much sense as deciding you want a businessman to pilot your commercial air liner…and it also has predictably disastrous results, especially when the businessman is an egotistical blowhard that won’t let anyone that knows what they are doing near the controls.
But for the benefit of those who still think having a businessman as president is a good idea, I will always enjoy pointing out what a horrible businessman Trump is.
Lets not forget Trump’s tactic of ‘unless the democrats help us destroy the ACA and kick millions off of insurance, we are going to sabotage the ACA and kick people off of insurance until the democrats come to the bargaining table’.