Donald Trump is not as tough as he thinks

That bricks-and-mortar framing is surprisingly helpful for understanding why America’s next president is both right and wrong about his ability to reshape the global order. The Telegram is willing to risk a prediction: in his second presidency, Donald Trump will wield tremendous power over allies and countries that profit from ties with America. With adversaries ready to burn relations with the West to the ground, his grip will be less sure.

Mr Trump sounds confident he has leverage on all fronts. Big economic partners, whether that means Canada, China, the European Union and Mexico, have been warned to brace for tariffs on their exports, followed by calls to renegotiate terms of trade with America. At the same time, Mr Trump has pledged to end Russia’s war with Ukraine within 24 hours. He has warned Hamas to release hostages taken in Israel on October 7th last year, or face being “hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America”.

The strengths and limits of this approach are apparent to American and foreign officials who watched Mr Trump’s first presidency up close. It is striking how often the same insiders draw lessons from his career building casinos, hotels and golf courses. Indeed, go back to interviews that Mr Trump has given over many years, and he sometimes makes America’s economy sound more like the world’s most valuable bit of real estate. Because he thinks previous American presidents were “suckers” who let foreign partners pay too little for access to it, he is ready to impose aggressive rent reviews.

In Mr Trump’s first presidency, numerous allies endured his dealmaker’s scrutiny. This was often a humiliating experience. In June 2017 Panama’s then-president, Juan Carlos Varela, secured a meeting in the Oval Office, a visit liable to boost him with voters back home. During their encounter, Mr Trump questioned why American warships pay to use the Panama Canal, which returned to Panamanian control in 1999. Mr Trump told his Panamanian guest that surrendering the canal zone was a terrible deal and that “we should take that thing back”, recalls America’s then-ambassador to Panama, John Feeley. To his relief the Panamanian leader, whom he had “assiduously prepped” to avoid confronting Mr Trump at all costs, tactfully changed the subject, Mr Feeley recalls. Mr Varela asked his host: “Mr President, can I ask you a question? How are you doing in Syria?”. (America is winning, he was told).

Another former American official watched Mr Trump bullying a string of allies, and draws links to his business career. As a developer, Mr Trump routinely told suppliers to lower their prices after they had completed projects. Some sued. Others wanted future business so gave in. “He always stiffed his subcontractors,” notes that eyewitness. “To him allies are like subcontractors.”

Many times, Mr Trump’s “unconventional thinking cut to the quick of things,” the former official goes on. Mr Trump asks “very good questions” and was “a wrecking ball to things that needed to be disrupted”. He had a patchier record when it came to building sturdier alternatives. Too often, Mr Trump’s ambitions were thwarted by his impatience with detail, and by his struggles to understand foreign leaders guided by incentives very different from his own. For all his tough talk, Mr Trump wants to be loved, seeing himself as a man of destiny sent to protect ordinary Americans’ interests, says the former official. He craves the approval of financial markets and of very rich people, whose wealth he takes as a proxy for brilliance. Truly cold-blooded rulers confound him. “Someone who is utterly ruthless, and who will slaughter anyone they need to, Trump can’t get his head around that.” In his first presidency, the businessman was “totally shocked” by intelligence briefings about Syria’s then-dictator, Bashar al-Assad, using poison gas on women and children in his own country. In contrast, the same former official watched Mr Trump failing to fathom leaders who acted on humanitarian impulses, as when Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, told him she had allowed Syrian refugees into her country because it was the right thing to do.

Not everyone wants to build beach resorts

Those same blind spots could become apparent once more when Mr Trump returns to office. President Vladimir Putin is willing to sacrifice terrible numbers of Russian lives to keep pushing deeper into Ukraine. Given that the Russian leader is currently winning ground while Ukraine suffers a crisis of manpower and morale, some Western officials wonder why Mr Trump imagines he can force Russia to stop the war soon. Trumpian threats to strike Hamas are equally unconvincing, for that terrorist group is willing to see Gaza destroyed to advance its fanatical goals.

A former Western diplomat says that Mr Trump placed excessive faith in economic incentives, as when he left an Obama-era pact to constrain Iran’s nuclear programme, the JCPOA, in 2018. Trump aides told allies that their builder-boss saw the pact as an edifice with bad foundations, fit only for demolition. The JCPOA was imperfect, agrees the former diplomat. Still, it imposed real curbs on Iran and Mr Trump’s rebuilding plan was worse: he asserted that harsher sanctions would swiftly bring Iran to its knees, leaving its rulers begging for a new deal. This did not happen. Nor was North Korea’s hereditary despot, Kim Jong Un, swayed by Mr Trump’s invitation to abandon nuclear arms and develop his country’s beaches for tourism. To the former diplomat, Mr Trump is constrained twice over: by his “vast lack of knowledge about abroad” and by his instinct that America should disengage from foreign wars. In a world on fire, the art of the deal has limits.

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