This is not immediately relevant to the election. But I wanted to flag something Donald Trump said yesterday in his teleprompter speech. Here’s the passage.
Some people say I’m too much of a fighter. My preference is always peace, however. And I’ve shown that. I’ve shown that for a long time. I’ve built an extraordinary business on relationships and deals that benefit all parties involved, always. My goal is always, again, to bring people together. But if I’m forced to fight for something I really care about, I will never, ever back down and our country will never ever back down.
This is a fascinating passage. Because this is not Trump’s reputation in business at all. Remember that no major banks other than Deutsche Bank (and apparently only one division of DB) will do business with Trump anymore. They’ve all been burned too often. Trump’s actual mode of operation is to cut sharp deals in which he wins and the counterparty gets screwed. If and when they sue, he digs in and tries to wait them out.
Remember the New York City real estate professional who I quoted Monday describing Trump’s MO. But even more, listen to how New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera puts it: “In every deal, [Trump] has to win and you have to lose. He is notorious for refusing to pay full price to contractors and vendors after they’ve completed work for him. And he basically dares the people he has stiffed to sue him, knowing that his deep pockets and bevy of lawyers give him a big advantage over those who feel wronged by him.”
Trump certainly isn’t the only businessman to pursue this sort of win/lose model of doing business. It can be highly profitable, if not necessarily sustainable. Whatever Trump did to Citibank to make them refuse to do business with him ever again … well, they should have known who they were dealing with when they decided to do business with a huckster. Obviously, Trump’s Trump University victims – often elderly novice investors bamboozled into spending their retirement savings on Trump’s swindle – are a good deal more sympathetic.
Regardless, win-win is emphatically not Trump’s way of doing business.
