'Dealmaker' Trump Frustrated By Inability to Strike Deals [View all]
Source: Daily Beast
Published May 10 2025 6:17PM EDT
President Donald Trump, who publicly touts himself as a “dealmaker-in-chief,” is privately upset at his failure to strike deals that will end the two wars he has sought to end, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. At a closed-door meeting with top donors at Mar-a-Lago last week, Trump admitted that the frustration he feels from his inability to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine keeps him up at night, people in the room told the WSJ.
He said that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump has frequently claimed is negotiating in good faith, has been driving an especially hard bargain. Putin wants “the whole thing,” Trump said, referring to Ukraine. The president also told the audience that bringing the war in Gaza to an end was tough, he had found, because “they’d been fighting for a thousand years,” the Journal reported.
Trump has marketed himself as a wily negotiator since long before he entered the political arena. During his first life as a real estate developer, Trump’s profile was elevated by the 1987 release of a best-selling book that shared his business strategy: The Art of the Deal.
The posturing hasn’t translated into concrete success during his second term in office. Despite vowing to bring a quick end to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the president has yet to deliver on either promise. “Bluster and theatrics have their role in diplomatic high-wire acts, but so do details and hard work,” Dan Baer, a former ambassador in Barack Obama‘s administration, told the Journal.
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/dealmaker-trump-frustrated-by-inability-to-strike-deals/
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