Trump & His Sycophants Insist Economic Meltdown Was All ‘The Art of the Deal’
Fox News claims Trump got "everyone in the world to come to the table." Maybe, but it's the same way a child screaming and shitting their diaper would get everyone in the room to try and calm them down.
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The damage, of course, is already done. By Monday, over $11 trillion in wealth in the U.S. had evaporated. Trump has (further) exposed to Wall Street and the world that he’s a maniac. By his own admission, he wasn’t exactly playing 4D chess here: He backed down because, in his own words, people were “yippy” (?) and “afraid”—not because China and the McDonald Islands (which have no human residents and are primarily inhabited by penguins) had sufficiently learned their lesson.
Trump further tried to explain that “financial markets, they change,” adding, “Over the last few days, it looked pretty glum too, I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history.” Observant and helpful! Leading domestic violence researchers who coined the now-famous term DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim-offender) have already compared the entire fiasco and Trump’s furious gaslighting to the tactics of abusers: DARVO is “the strategy Trump and his team have been using for years to distort reality,” they wrote in a scathing Thursday op ed, pointing to how Trump “dodges accountability by shifting blame, silencing critics and reframing oneself as victim.”
Nevertheless, since Trump announced the pause, key members of his base and his favorite Fox News talking heads have all gone feral in lavishing praise on his business acumen. Leavitt, herself, chided reporters for not being “familiar” with Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal. The book, published in 1987 and ostensibly written by Trump and co-author Tony Schwartz, is known as a business guidebook in which Trump touts opening negotiations with huge, crazy demands in order to get the other side to give you what you actually want. (If you’re a Veep fan, you might know this tactic as a “cock-thumb.”) But, as Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee put it, the book is Trump “mostly [just] bitching about not getting enough credit for renovating the ice rink in Central Park.”
Art of the Deal:
1) Impose massive tariffs on nearly every country that crash the markets and create the conditions for global economic collapse
2) Make zero deals with zero countries
3) Pause tariffs
4) VICTORY!! https://t.co/cRlWEPNAYW
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) April 9, 2025