The Zero-Sum Presidency
Mindset, not, ideology, is key to understanding how Trump rules—and why he won.
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It should all along have been obvious that Donald Trump’s second administration would be much more radical and impactful than his first.1 Even so, the sheer speed and extent with which Trump has been imposing his will on the country is astonishing. During his first two weeks back in the White House, he signed over 50 executive orders. He stepped up deportations and ended protected status for Venezuelan immigrants. He shuttered a big federal agency and fired scores of civil servants. He threatened to invade Greenland and Panama. He imposed new tariffs on China, got into a (short-lived) trade war with Canada and Mexico, and promised to do the same with Europe.
Some of these moves are testimony to the influence of ideology. The decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and the apparent determination to ban transgender people from serving in the military are both forms of right-wing purity politics.2 They are best explained as an attempt to turn the long-standing convictions of the most ideological members of the MAGA movement into political reality.
But other parts of Trump’s early agenda are much harder to explain in ideological terms. It simply isn’t the case that the MAGA base has for years been clamoring to conquer Greenland or retake control of the Panama Canal. Right-wing ideologues have not been calling for punitive tariffs on Canada or Germany. They have not even been obsessed with shuttering USAID or urging Trump to turn the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” We need a different explanation for why talk about these measures has taken pride of place during Trump’s first weeks in office.
This explanation, it seems to me, comes down to mentality rather than ideology. To understand Trump’s MO, you have to understand the lens through which he views the world. For him, virtually every realm of human endeavor is a form of zero-sum conflict. Many of his early moves are best understood as coming downstream from his conviction that, for America to win, somebody else has to lose.
Two Ways Of Viewing the World
A fundamental political difference that is often underappreciated does not touch directly on values or ideologies, nor on ethnic or religious allegiances. Rather, it stems from different ways of thinking about the basic background conditions for cooperation and competition in society, economics and international relations.
On one side of this divide stand those who believe that most realms of human endeavor allow us to enter into forms of cooperation that are mutually beneficial. They tend to believe that most conflicts are irrational and could be resolved if only everyone involved better understood each other’s values and interests, or stopped harboring hateful prejudices. Rather than squabbling over how to distribute the pie, they believe that we should figure out ways to grow it. The world, to them, is fundamentally positive-sum. Call them the “win-winners.”
The win-win mindset is epitomized in one of the bestselling books about negotiation. Written by leaders of the Harvard Negotiation Project, Getting to Yes warns participants against thinking of negotiations as an adversarial process in which different participants haggle over how to divide a fixed pie. Instead, they argue, parties to a negotiation should try to identify terms with which all of them would be genuinely happy, ideally by maximizing opportunities to grow the pie through mutual cooperation.
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On the other side of the divide stand those who insist that most realms of human endeavor pit people in direct competition with one another, with one’s gain premised upon another’s loss. They reject pious invocations that everybody can be a winner, insisting that many clashes of values or interests can only be resolved when one side prevails over the other—by comparatively peaceful means in areas such as business competition and by the use or threat of arms in more existential realms such as international relations. The world, to them, is fundamentally zero-sum: the goal of politics is to ensure that you get as big a share of the existing pie as possible. Call them the “win-losers.”
This mindset is epitomized in another bestselling book about negotiation: Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. The book—which, despite being ghostwritten, tells us more about Trump’s view of the world than a hundred profiles in national magazines—argues that negotiation is a form of warfare. The best way to prevail is to make extreme demands, to bluff about such things as your own resources or the willingness of other investors to step into the breach, and even to use psychological tricks like artificial deadlines to get under your adversary’s skin. The goal isn’t for both parties to go home satisfied; it is for each to extract as much value from the other as possible.
The distinction between those who see the world as zero-sum and those who see the world as positive-sum does not map neatly onto the left-right political spectrum.3 But in contemporary American politics, fundamental assumptions about whether the world is zero-sum have turned into a major fault line between the establishment and their populist challengers. Indeed, the two most important figures of 21st century American politics stand at opposite poles of the spectrum in regard to this question. While Trump is the quintessential “win-loser,” Barack Obama was the paradigmatic “win-winner.”
To understand why Trump won—and where his administration may go astray—we need to assess the respective advantages and disadvantages of these two diametrically opposed mindsets.
The Win-Winners
The belief in win-win arrangements is in many ways foundational for the ideas and institutions of modern democracy.
This is most obviously true in economics. The key benefit of a market economy is that it allows all of us to benefit while each of us pursues our own profit. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”
The prospect of win-win solutions has also been a big part of democratic aspirations in the international sphere. Ever since Thomas Hobbes pointed out how difficult it is to sustain peace in the absence of a coercive superior power, realists have feared that the anarchy of the international system makes conflict inevitable. Liberals countered that well-governed states, responsive to the preferences of their peace-loving citizens, would prove capable of forming lasting alliances that mitigate the risk of armed conflict between them. As Immanuel Kant suggested in his essay on Perpetual Peace, “if Fortune ordains that a powerful and enlightened people should form a republic—which by its very nature is inclined to perpetual peace—this would serve as a center of federal union for other states wishing to join, and thus secure conditions of freedom among the states in accordance with the idea of the law of nations.”
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In the twentieth century, the most ambitious political philosophers even came to believe that it may be possible to arrange society in such a way that every single aspect of it would be to mutual benefit. In A Theory of Justice, arguably the most influential book of academic political philosophy in the last hundred years, John Rawls premised the case for stringent economic redistribution on the argument that it was the only way to ensure that everyone would profit from being a member of society.4
These optimistic assumptions about the power of positive-sum thinking were the intellectual backdrop to the rise of Barack Obama. They made him confident that he could transcend partisan divisions, fueled his promise of “hope and change,” and explained the broad appeal of his candidacy. “If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read,” Obama said in his pivotal speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention,
that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.
This optimistic mindset was a big part of what attracted me to Obama when I moved to America in the fall of 2007, just as his improbable run for the presidency was gathering speed. On the whole, the conviction that the prospects for mutual benefit are many still shape my principles, perhaps even my personality. At heart, I too am a win-winner.
But to grasp the reasons why the optimists have lost out over the course of the past decade, we win-winners must seriously grapple with the shortcomings of our own instincts. Indeed, a reluctance to acknowledge that sometimes a win for one side entails a loss for another helps to explain some of the weakest points of Obama’s presidency. His health care reform, for example, did make a dysfunctional health care system a little less cruel. But big reforms—even ones that, on balance, are clearly positive—nearly always entail difficult trade-offs. While many people won, others lost. This is a point Obama’s administration was unwilling to acknowledge, leading to damaging missteps like his broken promise that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
An exaggerated trust in the prospects of mutual benefit also explained the biggest failures of Obama’s foreign policy. His assumption that America’s relationship with the Middle East would improve if both sides better understood each other’s point of view was the implicit premise behind his marquee address to the Arab world, delivered to little effect during the first year of his presidency. That same misplaced optimism drove the administration to a deal with Iran which empowered the theocratic dictatorship to increase the ambition of its most dangerous proxies throughout the region. It tempted Obama into a “reset” of relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia even after the latter had amply demonstrated his taste for territorial expansion. And it made the administration too slow to recognize that free trade with China had serious drawbacks for the American economy.5
The recognition of these shortcomings was, in turn, a core part of Donald Trump’s appeal when he ran for president in 2016. Throughout the campaign, he drew huge political capital from the ways—some real, some overstated—in which the world was supposedly taking advantage of the United States. He lambasted European countries for relying on American security without adequately investing in their own militaries, for example. And he invoked the economic threat from unfair competition so often that a supercut of him saying “China” went mega viral.
The core message was clear: establishment politicians—including Republicans like John McCain and George W. Bush—had been duped on account of their naivety. Trump, by contrast, would put “America First.” And the first step to doing so was to recognize that there wasn’t always a win-win solution.
The Win-Losers
If Trump’s bid for reelection was premised on a promise to dispense with the positive-sum mindset of his predecessors, he is undoubtedly delivering. In the first weeks of his administration, Trump has made it very clear that he takes a transactional approach to just about every aspect of political life.
This is true for Trump’s dealings with countries he considers enemies or adversaries. He is willing to impose steep tariffs on China and to threaten Putin with serious consequences if he persists with his war in Ukraine. At the same time, Trump does not shy away from negotiating with dictators or terrorists; even win-losers believe in the importance of negotiation so long as they feel confident that they are going to get the better end of the stick. (One of the most famous lines about poker holds that, if you can’t spot the sucker in the room, then you are the sucker. As The Art of the Deal makes amply clear, win-losers feel the same way about negotiations.)
More disconcertingly, Trump has also applied his ruthlessly transactional approach to the way he deals with America’s longtime allies. Earlier this week, he made a shock announcement that he would impose 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico. For about a day, it felt as though the end of an economic era was nigh. Then it became clear that Trump simply views tariffs as yet another bargaining chip. When Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, and Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, promised to meet American demands like increased investments in border security, Trump happily suspended the tariffs.6
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The same zero-sum mindset has also guided Trump’s treatment of long-term allies like Panama and Denmark. Rather than treating those nations like friends, he has bullied them, threatening to invade the Panama Canal and to incorporate Greenland into the United States. It remains to be seen whether, like the tariffs on Canada and Mexico, those threats will turn out to be mere negotiating chips—or whether, recognizing the weakness of his allies, Trump will actually turn hyperbolic bluster into astonishing reality.
Those of us who find this whole spectacle dangerous and unseemly would be well-advised not to underestimate its power. In many areas, Trump’s approach has brought real results. This includes some issues on which there is a bipartisan consensus: Bush and Obama, for example, were just as keen for America’s European allies to increase their military spending; it took Trump’s constant questioning of the value of NATO during his first term in office for them to start acquiescing to long-standing American requests.
Trump’s concrete wins are one reason why his approval ratings have, despite uniformly negative media coverage, actually risen since he took office. But while we must take the appeal of a ruthlessly zero-sum approach seriously, this isn’t a reason to overlook the great dangers it entails.
America has profited mightily from its ability to sustain long-term partnerships with countries that were able to trust its intentions. If allies from Europe to South America and East Asia come to believe that American presidents will, with little regard for these countries’ own economic and security interests, henceforth extract as much value from that partnership as possible, they are certain to hedge their bets.
This will take a long time. American allies like Denmark and Panama are now deeply dependent on the United States. When Trump threatens and cajoles them, they have little choice but to give in. But in the long-run, the perceived need for countries that have hitherto been fully integrated into American-led alliance structures to assure their strategic autonomy will undoubtedly create valuable openings for adversaries like Russia and China.7
The other risk lies in the weakening of an abstract set of ideas no less important for being easily mocked: what little remains of the norms of the international order, like the prohibition on using military means to achieve territorial expansion. If Trump makes good on his promise to expand the territory of the United States, implicitly carving the world up into spheres of influence within which great powers can proceed however they wish, other countries are sure to follow his lead in their own neck of the woods. A world in which Russia imposes its will on Eastern Europe and China subjugates East Asia doesn’t just run counter to American interests; it is also likely to contain a whole lot more war and suffering than it already does.
It is easy to mock win-winners for their reluctance to accept the hard realities of competition for scarce material resources, the unwillingness of religious or ideological extremists to desist from vanquishing their enemies, and the naked realities of great power conflict in an anarchic international system. But some forms of cynicism can, despite their proud rejection of such naive pieties, themselves be short-sighted. America has thrived in good part because it has managed to create a world—or at least a corner thereof—in which both individuals and nations really can engage in forms of cooperation that are of mutual benefit. To jeopardize these long-term assets for short-term gains is not nearly as hard-nosed as it pretends to be.
That’s why I ultimately remain inclined to believe that Getting to Yes is a better guide to life, to business and even to politics than The Art of the Deal. But those of us who are concerned about Trump’s ruthlessly zero-sum approach to the world would nonetheless do well to recognize that each has a contribution to make. Just as it is a mistake to view the social world through the monomaniacal lens of one category—whether it be class or race or religion—so too it is a mistake to believe that all realms of life are either win-win or win-lose.
During his first term in office, Trump was (as I have argued repeatedly over the past years) hamstrung in a number of important ways. He had no political experience; did not have full control over his own political party; barely had loyalists he could appoint to key positions; and came into office without a developed agenda. All of that has changed. Trump can now call upon four years of experience in the most powerful office in the country; he has succeeded in transforming the Republican Party in his own image; he can count upon thousands of loyalists who stand at the ready to serve his administration; and he has developed a much more detailed and aggressive agenda.
“Wokeness,” a term I have never much liked, refers to a particular ideological movement on the left that has specific intellectual roots. I am therefore skeptical about the growing tendency of commentators to talk about the kinds of steps Trump is taking as being owed to the “woke right.” But the kernel of truth which this term hints at is that both wokeness and these ideological steps undertaken by the Trump administration are instantiations of a form of purity politics that has, in the history of humanity, reared its head again and again in different ways: Both gravitate towards highly symbolic gestures, elevate ideological above practical goals, and entail a tendency to cancel anybody who offends the sensibilities of the “elect.”
In particular, zero-sum thinking is pronounced both on the extreme left and the extreme right. The extreme left tends to believe that questions of distribution are much more important than questions regarding economic growth, for example. Meanwhile, the extreme right is especially prone to zero-sum thinking in international relations, believing that the glory of one nation requires the domination of another.
In the argument for Rawls’ “difference principle,” the moral imperative of positive-sum solutions is central. Citizens who choose the rules of their society under fair conditions, foregoing any advantage from the power they may actually hold, Rawls argued, would want to make sure that every citizen is left better off by participating in such a “fair scheme of social cooperation.” This, Rawls argued, would lead people tasked with choosing principles of justice behind a “veil of ignorance” to demand that society be arranged in such a way as to only permit inequalities insofar as they maximize the well-being of the least well-off. It is not an exaggeration to say that the “difference principle” turned positive-sum thinking into the very basis of political morality.
In the realm of foreign policy, a naive faith in win-win solutions was arguably a matter of bipartisan consensus in the first decade of the 21st century. Obama rose to power in part because of his record of principled opposition to George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. But that invasion itself was the product of a misplaced faith in positive-sum solutions. Its planners naively assumed that the Iraqi people would welcome American soldiers as liberators, leading the country to build a flourishing democracy that would quickly be emulated by other countries throughout the region. And they failed to recognize that the invasion would create a power vacuum that would quickly be filled by a bloody, zero-sum conflict between Sunnis and Shias.
Characteristically, Trump has not fully taken the threat of tariffs off the table. For anybody who prioritizes negotiating leverage as much as he does, their possible reintroduction serves as a useful cudgel.
This temporal dimension may be one reason why zero-sum approaches tend to prevail in democratic competition. When you manage to stiff or strongarm a partner in a negotiation, the benefits from your victory are often immediate. The costs, by contrast, may not materialize for a long while to come. For now, the other party to the negotiation is resigned to working with you—but at the next possible opportunity, they may choose to work with a different partner instead.
The “win-win” confidence in eventually reaching mutual understanding is great for personal relationships and neighborly bridge building. On the global scale it absolutely does not work and Trump is correct to bully and corner both decent nations, like Canada and Germany, and indecent states (China, Iran). The globalized, cosmopolitan view of the world is shared by very few ( they are, of course, overrepresented in academia and political diplomacy) and it’s consequences are alienating for citizens of nations, who naturally place their own kin and their own way of life and their own connection to their ancestors far above any vapid dreams about global convergence on a common language and common philanthropic aims.
Furthermore, win-win has pushed immigration on the west so fast that it has fundamentally failed to assimilate new immigrants, and because of that, the win-win mindset is not just diplomats taking tax dollars to have nice dinners in gold plated Arab meeting rooms that amount to nothing because both parties have been overeducated out of saying what they really mean or want. The win-win mindset is responsible for an ever-present alienation that many citizens feel, as they realize that an entire layer of cultural familiarity, language and trust is no longer there, and that policy makers, educators, and philanthropic elites are spending all of their money on those who have not yet acclimated to the West instead of the native inheritors of Western traditions.
Hi Yascha. I always love reading or listening to your pieces and appreciate you making the comments section available. From time to time, I'm curious if you have lived in the U.S. (not in the Northeast or states like California). The reason is I find a lot of European journalists are still grappling with what Trump truly represents. I find most European journalists are leftist ideologues just like most Europeans (i have lived in the EU on and off for 20+ years in 5+ countries). Reading this piece, I'm reminded of two things Former Secretary of Defense Robert said in an interview. 1. Biden has been wrong about every foreign policy issue for 40 years. 2. While Obama was an intelligent President and logical President he has worked for, he also assumed that other Head of State were the same. You can substitute Europe for Biden in the first case. You can also substitute Europeans' mentality of Win Winners for the second case. Europeans assume if they are kind and compassionate, that their enemies will become their friends. Russia has already dispelled this notion and China will as well. The moral purity Europeans seek has to be backed by something and Europeans are simply not willing to exert any strength/authority/power to get anything that benefits Europeans. When wolves were culled in Yellowstone, the effects were devastating to the environment. Think of Trump as the reintroduction of the into a decrepit environment to help improve things. Last point, Angela Merkel will be known as the smartest Chancellor of Germany but in 20 years, she will also be known as its worse.