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What Some People Call Lying

3 min readFeb 4, 2025

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Trump calls deal-making

Photo by Gregory Hayes on Unsplash

Give me your lunch money or I’ll punch you in the stomach, is how most of us are exposed to Trump’s style of deal-making.

It’s so beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness that even those who dislike Trump must admit he’s profoundly successful at conjuring up sloppy shakedowns that seem to work every, single, time.

It helps to be the president of a country where your Supreme Court gives you the power to be above the law.

It also helps if you have your finger on a nuclear button which can be justifiably intimidating to countries without much military power.

The pattern of Trump’s deal-making is to throw out something preposterous and then walk it back while grabbing goodies along the way.

Sometimes those goodies overlap and intersect with us peasants and a trickle-down effect occurs and the country feels the deal is successful.

Most of the time, only billionaires and near trillionaires benefit.

A perfect example of Trump’s wielding his deal-making sword is what he did this week with Canada and Mexico. He threatened 25% tariffs and then backed down the same day, claiming to have secured more soldiers on each border to protect us from illegal immigration.

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Jonathan Morris Schwartz
Jonathan Morris Schwartz

Written by Jonathan Morris Schwartz

Jonathan Morris Schwartz is a speech-language pathologist writing about human relationships, love, politics, philosophy, and consciousness.

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