America Needs the Art of the Deal

“I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form…. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks,” opened Donald Trump’s hit 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal.

Thirty-six years after publication, Trump’s perspective on business, negotiation, finance, and dealing still holds up, and the United States once again needs a heavy dose of it injected into today’s politics.

The Art of the Deal communicates a philosophy that, at its heart, is based on hard work, strength, fighting back, fiscal conservatism, and free-market capitalism — ideas that are inseparable from the American ethos. If these principles were applied to American government, our country would be successful again.

Long before the White House and politics, Donald Trump was known for being a Manhattan-based real-estate developer, an expert at taking on undesirable properties and making them great. His success stories are numerous and glamorous.

Consider one of Trump’s first major real estate projects: Swifton Village in Cincinnati, Ohio, a 1,200-unit apartment complex that Trump purchased for less than $6 million and described as “a very troubled place.”

Trump outlined in his book the steps he took to turn the place around. First, he removed all the bad tenants — i.e., the ones who trashed their apartment and paid rent late — and evicted them; then, the complex was thoroughly cleaned and made spotless; and finally, good management was hired to oversee the investment. The result was a quick success. Swifton Village attracted good residents who were business owners and families. According to Trump, he flipped the project and sold it for $12 million, a $6 million profit.

As simple as it sounds, Trump’s “art of the deal,” when applied to government, is exactly the formula America needs. Imagine if the process to turn around Swifton Village — evict the bad tenants, clean up, and hire competent managers — was applied to the southern border, America’s inner cities, and, perhaps most importantly, America’s administrative state.

Right now, America has become like Trump’s apartment complex — a run-down, dirty, and mismanaged operation where many of the tenants are illegally taking up residence, bills cannot be paid, and all the management needs to be fired.

And just like Swifton Village, America needs a savvy, cunning, and effective new overseer to overhaul the project. That man is Donald Trump. And despite his faults, he knows how to deliver results. “You can’t con people, at least not for long,” Trump stated in his business memoir. “You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

Trump did indeed “deliver the goods” in his first term as president. He removed the United States from the horrible Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the Paris Climate Accord, pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, blocked federal funding for Planned Parenthood, appointed conservative Supreme Court justices, lowered fuel prices, and initiated U.S. energy independence, all while promoting nationalism over globalism — to name just a few of the promises he kept. No president since Calvin Coolidge has shrunk the size and scope of government as Donald Trump did.

America’s current leaders are fiscally illiterate at best, and they don’t know how to negotiate, deal, and win for “We The People.” And, most likely, many of them are willingly selling out for personal and political gain and need to be evicted from government.

Just last week, 22 Republican senators joined Democrats to pass a $95 billion foreign-aid bill, with $60 billion going to Ukraine. This comes despite America’s $34 trillion in debt. As Trump said in The Art of the Deal, “Politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.”

Ultimately, Trump cannot single-handedly save America from the crippling debt, inflation, and moral and spiritual decay in our communities and institutions. No one politician ever could; however, Trump is not a bought-and-paid-for politician and is currently the best-equipped candidate to move the needle closer to what our Founding Fathers created: a moral, limited, constitutional republic.