Bad faith negotiators and pathological liars: US-Canada edition

Aaaaand we're back.

As you may not have read amid the national attention to John McCain, there is ongoing major news in US-Canada trade negotiations.  That shouldn't be major news.  It should be fodder for some attempt to revamp the South Park movie, but we live in a bad movie script, so... here we are.  I've spoken my peace on John McCain, and more importantly, done my mourning for Aretha Franklin, so let's get back into the trade idiocy.

Trump wants some new trade "deal."  Why the quote marks?  Trump has fetishized the word, "deal," but he doesn't know what an actual deal is.  He just likes bullying people, and opposes trade like the mercantilist idiot that he is.  He insists that everyone else is stupid, and that he negotiates great "deals," because it contributes to the character he plays.  What, specifically, does Trump want?  He wants to make people grovel.  That's it.  He doesn't have a clue how trade works.  If he did, he wouldn't be a mercantilist.

So, what's the news?  The news is that somebody leaked an off-the-record comment Trump made about being unwilling to budge at all in NAFTA renegotiations, and that got to the Toronto Star.  Who leaked it?  Good question, and from the GOP perspective, it really does show press animosity towards Trump.  Yes, they fuckin' hate that guy.  This was a breach of trust and a violation of protocol.  You rarely see a post in which I say Trump has a point, but when someone says that their comments are off-the-record, if the press leaks it, you've got a real problem.  Now, there is also a hypocrisy issue given the leakiness of the White House...  Hell, Trump himself handed national security secrets to the Russians in the Oval Office with the world watching.  Still, worth noting.

Why do it, though?  There was a reason.  Justified?  That's always the question with Trump.

One of the most salient aspects of Donald Trump is that he is a pathological liar.  No, that isn't in the DSM, although compulsive dishonesty is associated with antisocial personality disorder, of which he is a textbook example.  However, Trump lies about everything.  All.  The.  Time.

He lies stupidly.

He lies after he has been caught.

Trump is just the lying-est liar who has ever lied a lie.  Never believe a word out of that liar's lying mouth.  When dealing with someone like Trump, that's just the rule you have to follow.

And that's a basic problem for journalists.  How do you cover a liar like that?  You can't just print/air what he says.  I have written about this before, and the problem hasn't gone away.  Trump himself puts the press in a bind by lying so much.  Trump has breached the relationship with the press by never, under any circumstances, telling the truth.  Does that free the press to do what they must do to ensure that the truth is revealed?

By, for example, leaking it?  In the sense of the general practices that journalists use, they can't do it, but Trump has already broken those rules.  This is sort of a question of whether or not you accept the principle of unilateral disarmament.  Trump has taken up verbal arms, and expects the press to follow normal rules when he doesn't.  Does that dog hunt?

Of course, we then get to the lie itself.  Trump is, of course, engaged in bad faith negotiations with Canada.  What do you expect from the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie?  That's what liars do.  They lie.  And never do anything in good faith.  "Good faith" is such a foreign concept to something like Trump that if you tried to explain the concept to him, his Trump-brain couldn't process it.  These are simply different facets of the mind of an intrinsically dishonest person who cannot comprehend anything associated with honor.

As I mentioned in passing in my other post today, my hotel reading at the conference was C.S. Friedman's Crown of Shadows.  One of the central characters is Gerald Tarrant.  Tarrant is essentially a sorcerer/vampire/uber-powerful-type thing, but his power is based in death and coldness.  Anything based in life or warmth, his magic cannot control.  Trump's brain is kind of like that when it comes to anything related to honor or decency.  These concepts are so antithetical to him that they negate him in the way that life and warmth are foreign to Gerald Tarrant.  (If you know the series, maybe I should analogize Trump to an Iezu…)  The analogy falls apart with the observation that Tarrant is a genius, among other things, but he also preys on vulnerable women, so there's that.  Anyway, I digress.  Read the "Coldfire Trilogy."

Regardless, engaging in good faith negotiations requires honesty.  An intrinsically dishonest person cannot do that.  There should be no surprise, then, by the leak that Trump never had any intention of engaging in good faith negotiations with Canada.  Once again, any time presidential reputation or bargaining comes up, I reference Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power.  Presidents bargain on the basis of their reputation, meaning their perceived likelihood of keeping their word and following through on what they say.  Neustadt was concerned more with how presidents relate to Congress, but the same principles apply.  If a president approaches another head of state and says, "let's talk about trade," a president with a positive reputation for serious negotiation can be trusted to engage in a real back-and-forth exchange of terms.

Trump?  He has never done anything in good faith in his life.  Trudeau had to have known, from the beginning, that Trump was just going to make demands and offer nothing in exchange (or at least nothing on which he would follow through) because Trump is a lying, backstabbing, cheating, two-faced representation of everything that can go wrong if you strip a human brain of any capacity for conscientiousness.

What happens in that circumstance?  There's no deal.  The leak just confirmed what anyone with a brain should have known-- that Trump-the-liar was acting in bad faith, as he always is.

Pathological liars are always acting in bad faith.  Always.  That means negotiations with them are extraordinarily difficult.  You can't talk to them the way you talk to a human who has a conscience.  The only thing that exists in such a circumstance is leverage.  Trump tries to apply leverage with tariffs.  Other countries retaliate.  That's all there is, and that's all there will be.  Tariffs are intrinsically stupid, and that's where we are.  We have a pathological liar for President, who acts in bad faith at all times, because that's what liars do, and that means he just looks for leverage, but he's stupid, so leverage for him means tariffs on the international trade front, and that's...

Wow.  Yeah.  Wow.

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