The Trump Method: How to Negotiate Without Destroying the World Right Away
USA, March 11, 2025 – The skepticism of critics towards the rhetoric of Donald Trump and his team cannot distract from the fact that it is often effective, i.e. it instantly changes the political situation. Vitaly Leybin, editor-in-chief of the Teller blog, explains how this stylistic method works.
“Trump is a showman, and a showman is very recognizable in the American cultural tradition, he is its own. He is a man of continental thinking in the sense that America is the beginning and the end of the world for him. He is very charismatic, he is one of the most charismatic American leaders in history. He is uneducated, but very talented,” says Richard Tempest, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in response to our question about how innovative his political and rhetorical style is for the US, how much it is native or foreign to them.
“He comes from the New York construction business and he embodies this style,” continues Tempest. – There is nothing wrong with that, Trump’s weakness may be that he is transferring this subculture to world politics.” Let’s try to understand, avoiding political prejudices and assessments, what are the strengths and weaknesses of Donald Trump’s rhetoric. We will not pay attention to the content of his political actions, but to the form of his oral and written texts, the way he works with his speech.
Why Trump curses
Let’s look at a fragment from the beginning of Trump’s welcome speech on February 22, 2025 at the right-wing Conservative Party Action Conference (CPAC), which we have divided into lines for convenience:
Crooks, liars, fraudsters, globalists and bureaucrats from the “deep state”. leave.
Criminals from the ranks of illegal immigrants are going home.
We are draining the swamp and restoring people’s power.
Washington has been run for years by a sinister group of radical left-wing Marxists, war profiteers instigators and corrupt people who have drained our wealth, attacked our freedoms and destroyed our borders. and drained the life out of our country. Now it will not be like that.
We see that it sounded like a poem – Trump’s speech (even in the original) is rhythmic, with short accents – formulas or slogans. The combination of long and short “lines” creates his recognizable punchy style. He repeats the most successful formulas (for example, about the promise to drain the “Washington swamp”) repeatedly and for many years. And it is not boring, like a television series with a distinctive character who has his own lines. It is a show. And this is closer to rap than to stand-up storytelling, although an experienced comedian will similarly deliver a tirade in one breath and then give a short punchline, after which the audience laughs and applauds. The amount of vulgarity in each of Trump’s speeches is striking, and it is the same style of communication as in a rap battle. Rudeness is the beginning of conflict, conflict is a sign of communication. He who does not offend anyone in his texts risks being unnoticed. If you want to be heard, you need to be aware of whom you will offend. Such people who will not be able to remain silent. This is not a specific law of battles or speeches of populist politicians, it is a general law that Trump applies as often as possible: he chooses a strong (or the right) opponent and treats him with the strongest expressions. We can notice similar intonations more often in politicians labeled as populists, but in fact we can observe them in all politicians who are experienced in political speech.
Let us recall, for example, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who also liked to swear (“bastards, just bastards”). When he spoke in the State Duma in 2013, he suddenly switched to a recitative similar to Trump’s:
“Give us back our legitimate mandates, we have ten of them, suffocate us with them – take eight, take nine, but keep one, have a conscience, Genghis Khan kept more, Hitler kept more… All our people will curse you, everyone will curse you”.
Political speech – unlike, for example, professional, scientific or bureaucratic speech – is emotional and subjective, there is an “I” and a “we” in it and a conflict between this “we” and political opponents. Where a bureaucrat will talk in a bro-like and factual manner about thousands of centimeters per hectare or give a forecast of GDP percentages to the second decimal place, a politician must call for action, added Vitaly Leibin.
“Over the past four years, the Department of Justice has been politicized like never before. That’s why I’ve ordered the firing of ALL ‘Biden-era’ Department officials. We must immediately ‘clean house’ and rebuild trust. America’s Golden Age demands an honest legal system – It starts TODAY.” In this post (February 2025), you can see how the choppy rhythm of rhetoric suits social media.
You can also see the perfect dramatic structure in this post:
a terrible challenge (“politicized like never before”); a challenge accepted (“I ordered it”); a climax and resolution of the conflict with a change in its nature – the golden age begins.
The point of political speech is not to inform or tell the truth, but to connect people. Sometimes this requires truth and accuracy, and sometimes it does not. Political speech in this sense is like ideology, which the philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (in “Essay on Modern European Philosophy”) said “has nothing to do with truth” and that this is the main thing that students should learn about it. However, there are times when politicians are definitely telling the truth – when they promise something unpleasant, which is sure to provoke criticism, discontent and conflict. For example, when they promise the use of violence. And it must be said that Donald Trump fulfilled almost all his promises in his first term (except for the normalization of relations with Russia).
For example, he tightened migration policy – no one would falsely promise something for free, which would provoke a storm of criticism. Political speeches have their consequences, so restrained politicians try to dose them. As Viktor Chernomyrdin, another master of political speech, used to say: “I will say nothing, or I will say something repeatedly.” But Trump is not a reserved politician. Why Trump is wrong In 2019, journalist and analyst Daniel Dale analyzed for The Toronto Star all of Donald Trump’s statements (collected on the Factba.se website) that the then US president had made, and in 1,340,330 words, he found (no more, no less) 5,276 falsifications. A grandiose piece of work! One problem with this study is that it understands lies and falsehood too broadly.
For example, Trump’s tweet is marked as containing a falsehood: “Democrats cannot accuse a Republican president of crimes committed by Democrats.” The investigator’s comment: “There is no evidence that Democrats are guilty of serious crimes related to Russia.” However, we see here that we are not dealing with a discussion of facts, but with a political polemic on a highly politicized issue, in which both statements are controversial and at the same time justified.
There are many such examples when the author of the study confuses the detection of forgeries with political dissent. However, Dale also found many factual errors, often related to Trump’s incorrect use of numerical data. For example, in the post “We have a $100 billion trade deficit with Mexico. It’s time!” critics point out that Trump lied about this figure. According to statistics from 2018, the deficit was not $100 billion, but $78 billion. This is indeed a big mistake (22%), but it does not invalidate the political thesis: the deficit exists and is large. But what would be a disqualification for a high-profile official, showman and president, his supporters perceive as a simple rounding off in order to better express his position.
Trump’s regular errors in the numbers seem to have a system that helps him achieve his goals. For example, Trump’s recent claim that Volodymyr Zelensky has only 4 percent popular support has proven to be a bait for discussion. The Ukrainian president hastened to refute this figure, which was clearly pulled from the ceiling, by hastily publishing very current and probably not entirely neutral polls that gave him first 57 percent (KMIS poll) and then 65 percent (Rating Group poll) of public trust. However, the refutation failed on less flattering data that raised interest in some of the undemocratic features of the Ukrainian political system, which was definitively established during the war. A Socis Group poll published in February 2025 showed that if elections were held in Ukraine, less than 16 percent would vote for Zelensky and more than 27 percent for former commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny. The discussion began with Trump’s mistake and ended with the confirmation of his thesis about the weak support of the Ukrainian president even in the conditions of military propaganda. This means that Trump’s mistakes are far from always a “record”, it is also an invitation to “trade” – who is bigger. Opponents begin to discuss the number, and thus begin to discuss the topic that Trump imposed on them.
“You don’t have (strong) cards,” Donald Trump told Zelensky during their scandalous meeting in the White House on February 28, 2025. An important part of rhetoric is the call to speak from a position of strength. This style is aimed at fooling the interlocutor in negotiations, imposing on him the idea of \u200b\u200bthe weakness of his position and forcing him to become more accommodating. At the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump threatened Canada and Mexico with deadly tariffs of 25% if the authorities of these countries did not meet his expectations on measures against illegal immigrants and drug smuggling. In the heat of a dispute with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump even suggested that Canada become the 51st state of the United States. Tariffs against Canada, like those against Mexico on a similar issue, were not introduced at that time (they were introduced later, on March 4), but the aggressive start made it possible to conduct a conversation from a position of strength. It is similar to the negotiating style used by gangsters, when partners are forced to conclude an agreement by an explicit threat. Perhaps this style is also practiced by large New York developers, with the difference that the threat is no longer forceful, as in the case of raiders, but economic.
It is clear that this style appeals to far-right voters as a sign of determination to defend their interests against other nations and parties. However, it also has a flip side. If the negotiating partner also knows how to play the fool, the aggressively initiated game falls apart. And statements like Trump’s “I said long before the election that we need Greenland,” in themselves increase the risk of real conflict and increased security measures on the part of the partners. Paradoxically, with this “hooligan” style of negotiation, Donald Trump has so far appeared to be one of the most pacifist US presidents: during his first term, America did not start a single new war, while at the beginning of his second term, he tried to end two conflicts: in Gaza and in Ukraine.
A ceasefire was quickly achieved in Gaza, while the public debate around Ukraine began to change dramatically. If previously Western countries discussed the conflict in the emotional spirit of military ideology – there is a treacherous enemy and there is his victim, Trump introduced an element of agreement into the discussion (on mineral resources in Ukraine and control over spending on aid allocated to it). Suddenly, an ethical argument appeared – Trump called the war absurd, although he again exaggerated the numbers (probably by an order of magnitude, claiming that the victims were in the millions). But even with this exaggeration, it was a fresh breath of common sense, because for three years the parties to the conflict and their allies, hiding behind the pathos of the struggle of good against evil, talked about the “crushing” of the enemy’s manpower and the supply of weapons, not human lives. And this is really the most important thing.
It is difficult to say where the clear and direct ethical position of Trump’s scandalous negotiation comes from, but it is clear that there is political and pragmatic interest behind it (and this is a topic for another post). It is possible that his talent as a master debater shows that the one who has the cards of all three types of rhetoric in his hands – pathos (emotions from the fight against the enemy), logos (a deal with the devil, if it is advantageous) and ethos (sacred values and human life) – wins over those who base everything only on pathos and cannot talk about anything other than the enemy. And this is precisely what makes Trump’s right-wing rhetoric, which fights against foreign migrants and expresses the intention to annex foreign territories, different from the usual rhetoric of fascists – they have everything tied to the rhetoric of the fight against the enemy, while Trump’s speeches are colorful and contradictory and are not lacking in humanistic theses. However, in order to be able to present an ethical argument to the public in detail, we must have an internal basis for it.
US Vice President J.D. Vance is known as a devout Catholic (he argues with the Pope about the interpretation of love for one’s neighbor and migrants) and assumes It is believed that his worldview was influenced by the philosopher-anthropologist René Girard, who exposed war and the mechanics of violence in the foundations of human culture. However, Trump is hardly a devout believer and certainly does not engage in philosophy. It is possible that war contradicts the very idea of a good deal. It is too risky a way of trading, because even those who hold the strongest cards in their hands can lose, Vitaly Leybin added.
Erik Simon
