Trump the transactional: A dangerous relief

How to deal with the dealmaker-in-chief? Take a leaf out of TikTok’s book ...
4 mins read

The second Donald Trump presidency raises a difficult question for the C-suite around the world: is their job to instigate change or just cope with change? On the one hand sits legacy, character and, possibly, riches. On the other sits dexterity, responsibility and, possibly, safety.  

The hypocrisy of corporate titans in the face of the second coming of The Donald is now close to laughable. But then again, that’s easy to say from the outside. If you are sitting with large staff in an American corporation and you know your president wants you to genuflect, what do you do? You hold your tongue, swallow your pride and genuflect. Your shareholders will celebrate and your staff will understand.  

Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told Bloomberg this week that the situation reminded him of what happened when Napoleon escaped from Elba. French newspapers initially characterised Napoleon as a “monster” and an “ogre”. But as he neared Paris, the papers announced “His Majesty” was arriving. 

And the comparison with royalty does not go amiss. CEOs of companies around the world know that Trump is excessively sensitive to criticism and easily swayed by flattery. So, business leaders are moving fast, laying it on thick and gritting their teeth – even though they know the public will see through this affectation immediately. The balance of risks is not now the lack of public appreciation, it’s avoiding approbation.  

There is a question about whether for many CEOs the rolling back of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives isn’t so much an ideological retreat as a relief. For Coke and Walmart, which have just scrapped their DEI programmes in the run-up to Monday’s inauguration, how much did they actually believe in DEI in the first place? There are affectations on both sides of the ideological divide that the C-suite needs to recognise. 

This posturing goes beyond the C-suite, and includes global political leaders and politicians. Countries around the world have spent the past weeks, no doubt, honing their “Trump strategy” – because a strategy is what you need in the face of this onslaught. Just letting things unfold is really not going to cut it.  

Playing the Trump card 

So what would a good Trump strategy look like? It’s actually not as difficult as it might seem because politicians, and businesspeople for that matter, around the world are aware that Trump is nothing if not transactional. He sees the world as a zero-sum-game construct, and you would if you were, say, a property mogul.  

Buying and selling property is all about reading the room, identifying opportunities, and negotiating hard. In a sense, Trump’s life-long background as a property tycoon was perfect training to be a politician. It requires entering negotiations in a context in which your opponent is at least somewhat afraid of you.  

Hence the ostentatious showmanship and the brash, theatrical posture. It’s something of a parody. But at the end of the day, what counts is what you hold in your hand, and Trump is acute enough to know that, ultimately, he can’t overbid.  

And yet the dangers of “overbidding” are high, as they always are if you have a zero-sum mentality. A good example is the standoff between the US government and the Chinese app TikTok. By lifting the ban on TikTok, Trump was effectively overruling a law passed by his own party in large numbers. In the 435-seat House of Representatives, 197 Republicans and 155 Democrats voted for the bill, while 15 Republicans and 50 Democrats voted against it. It was passed by a similar margin in the Senate. 

ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, had the option of selling 50% of the app to an American company to avoid the drama, but chose not to. It effectively chose to play hardball on the one hand by not selling, and softball on the other by genuflecting toward Trump, knowing that the banning of the app is unpopular in the US.  

And it won. Trump announced he would sign an executive order to bring back TikTok after he is sworn in, and TikTok then reopened its service to Americans. The ban, one of the very few bipartisan decisions of the Joe Biden era, and endorsed no less by the US Supreme Court, was overturned in a tweet. In short, TikTok played its cards right – and Trump blinked first. 

Coining it

The other telling curiosity of the inauguration was Trump’s decision to launch a memecoin, announced at the Crypto ball, which he didn’t attend in person last Friday night. He announced on Truth Social that “My New Official Trump Meme is HERE”, while blockchain bigwigs were snacking on lobster rolls and burgers. The coin reached a market cap of $5.5bn by Saturday afternoon. By Sunday morning it was worth 10 times that. (Technically speaking, this is crypto – valuations are conceptual.)

Crypto kings marvelled. Axios’s managing editor for business, Ben Berkowitz, wrote that it spoke “to the nature of the crypto industry that someone could have more than $50bn worth of something that literally did not exist 48 hours previously”. (Actually, it was never worth $50bn – see above.)

But the story didn’t end there. Trump’s wife Melania launched her memecoin later in the week, and the Trump coin dropped in value by 35% as the first movers dumped his coin for his wife’s. Melania’s coin is now worth more than $5bn. 

The point is that both Trump and his wife are literally cashing in on the presidency. Which, to everybody out there, must be an enormous relief, because it underlines what we already know. If the poop hits the fan, there is always the fallback option of just buying some memecoins. Having a “transactional president” is, well, at the end of the day, a curious comfort. Or not? 

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Tim Cohen

Tim Cohen is a long-time business journalist, commentator and columnist. He is currently senior editor for Currency and editor at large for the Daily Maverick. He was previously the editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.

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