Trump 2.0: The Art of the Deal

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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This week, the president proposed two deals — one at home, the other abroad — that would require allies to put his needs ahead of theirs. And in both cases, Trump got exactly what he wanted. To understand why, I spoke with three of my colleagues, White House Correspondents Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs and congressional correspondent Catie Edmondson.

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It’s Friday, February 28th.

So, friends, welcome back, all three of you to the roundtable. Zolan and Katie, thank you for being in our Washington studio. Good to have you.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us, Michael.

Thank you, Michael.

I didn’t even say hello to you yet, Maggie.

Oh. [MUSIC PLAYING]

How presumptuous of me.

There’s an order to this all. The host says hello, and the guests — you can’t just get ahead of it. You can’t just circumvent.

I hope you all keep this in.

That’s the plan. Ready? Maggie, thank you very much for being here.

Michael, thank you for having me.

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So this was a week, I would argue, of dealmaking by President Trump. And we are going to spend time on two of those deals. And you’ve all been carefully selected because of your relationship to these deals. The first deal was with Congress, and there was a lot of drama surrounding this one, as there often is with Congress. Maggie, just to start, what was this?

Trump has been very focused, and his aides have been very focused in the White House, on trying to get through some kind of a bill through Congress that reflected what he campaigned on. So that’s —

Not an executive action, which has pretty much define this presidency.

Correct. Trump has taken a number of executive actions. He’s very proud of it. But you can’t do everything that way. Spending has to get passed through Congress, at least in this form. So this House bill was sort of a half-man, half-horse of Trump’s campaign promises.

That’s a very intriguing metaphor. Catie, can you explain what this half-man, half-horse thing was that ends up before Congress?

Yeah, I mean, the campaign promises that Maggie highlighted are really tax cuts. It is extending the 2017 tax cuts that his administration passed the first time around. And there are a number of other taxes that, on the campaign trail, he said he wanted to eliminate.

But for a lot of House Republicans, they don’t want to just cut taxes. They also want to cut spending, federal spending.

Right. That’s a huge part of their message. It’s a huge part of their brand. It’s a huge part of the Republican Party identity for the last decade.

Absolutely, and so a number of these Republicans have said, President Trump were very happy to extend your tax cuts to cut taxes more, but we also need to be able to cut federal spending. And that is what this budget resolution that they put to a vote on the House floor on Tuesday night laid out the parameters for.

OK. And so what happens once this half-man, half-horse — I’m just going to keep saying that as many times as I can — reaches the House floor?

Well, this is the balancing act that Speaker Johnson has really had to deal with his entire time as speaker, which is placating, basically, both the ultra conservatives in his conference and the more moderate Republicans, many of whom represent sort of swing districts. And so you heard some concerns from those more centrist Republicans who are saying, look, I know this resolution we’re about to vote on doesn’t say that we’re going to cut programs like Medicaid or Medicare, but we’re looking at the way this bill has been written. And it seems that almost certainly in order to get to the levels of spending cuts we’re talking about, we’re going to have to cut programs like Medicaid.

And so you had some deep concerns from lawmakers who represent districts where a lot of their constituents rely on Medicaid. At the same time, you had these ultra conservatives say, actually, I think this bill doesn’t cut spending enough, and I’m not sure if I can bring myself to vote for this resolution if it, in fact, is going to increase the deficit.

I don’t think we can let what you just said about Medicare and Medicaid fly by. That’s a biggie in American politics. So whoever wants to take this on, what about this plan seems to many to require touching the third rail of American politics, which is potentially cutting these two huge health programs that millions and millions of Americans rely on?

Well, I don’t want to get us into the weeds too much, but the way a budget resolution is structured, lawmakers aren’t required to lay out the specific policy changes that they want to make in order to hit these spending targets. But it does instruct individual committees and say, look, you need to go and find, you know, x number of dollars of cuts when we build this legislation that we’re ultimately going to put to the floor for a vote. And so in this particular resolution, lawmakers have told the committee that oversees Medicaid and Medicare spending, we need you guys to find, in this case, $880 billion in cuts.

Over 10 years, right?

Over 10 years.

$880 billion over 10 years. And there’s only so many ways that you can actually reach those cuts. And for a program like Medicaid — and just as a reminder, this is the government program providing health insurance for low-income Americans.

Bless you for explaining that.

That’s now a program that could be on the chopping block here in this saga.

Well, let’s talk about how that — to use your word, Zolan — saga unfolds in Congress when the president starts to ask members of his party in Congress to pass this unwieldy thing that might require, as you all said, cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

So this was, yet again, another vote on the House floor, where we really didn’t know if Speaker Johnson had the support necessary to push this legislation through. He’s working with extraordinarily thin margins. We saw Democratic leaders actually bring back a number of their lawmakers who have been ill, who have not been at the Capitol.

Or who just, I think I saw this, had a baby like a couple weeks ago.

A month ago. Yes, a month ago had a baby. Come back to the Capitol for this vote, trying to ratchet up the pressure. Speaker Johnson, as he walked out onto the House floor, said, I have the votes. Meanwhile, I was texting with a Republican who had said they were going to oppose the resolution because it added to the deficit. And they said, by my count, there’s three of us who are going to oppose it, which would doom it.

But it turns out they both were kind of right. Speaker Johnson was able to push this resolution across the finish line in the end, but it took about an hour. We saw him and some of his deputies really working over about three, four Republican lawmakers. These were all ultra conservative lawmakers who said they didn’t want to vote for this resolution because it would add to the deficit.

It looked for a while like Johnson was not going to be able to get them to flip. But then something notable happened, which is that the Republican leadership spirited some of these defectors off the House floor. And when that happened, I thought, I have seen this movie before, because that is what happened when Johnson was reelected back in January.

Right.

They took the defectors off the floor and they got a call from President Trump.

Maggie, is this where you come in?

This is where I come in. So one of the potential defectors, Victoria Spartz from Indiana, got a call from Trump, or spoke to Trump. It’s not clear to me who initiated the call, but he was really pressuring her, as we understand it, to vote for this bill.

And at this moment, when the Republican Party is living in Congress so fearful of Trump —

So encroached upon.

— and so afraid to go against him in any way, and he is making an example of anyone who does, this was a lot of pressure.

Mm-hmm. And ultimately, she votes for it.

Right. And it passes 217 to 215 with just one Republican voting against.

Let’s focus for just a second on the question of spending and debt, which would seem to be the thing that these defectors principally were upset about. How much is this budget going to increase the US debt?

So what house Republicans have given themselves is they’ve said we are going to cut taxes by $4.5 trillion. And then we are going to cut spending by $2 trillion. So essentially, you are looking at a piece of legislation here that is going to add to the deficit by $2.5 trillion. And for a lot of lawmakers, that’s a big number.

Yeah, it’s a big number. And this is where — and Zolan and Maggie, I’m curious what you think — we know where many members of the Republican Party stand on this. House Republicans have ousted speakers over failures to rein in spending and be tough enough on the debt. And here comes the president kind of bulldozing those who raised that question about spending and debt.

And that creates a really complicated and, I think I’d argue, incoherent message about what the Republican brand is, especially in Congress, but also at the White House. Is it the party that cares about deficit and DOGE and cutting spending and getting rid of people so that we have a smaller government, or is it the party that creates additional debt so that it can cut taxes?

It’s complicated, Michael. And I think — look, Republicans have been complaining about debt and the deficit forever. And under Trump’s term, certainly, it was added to.

The first one.

So, right. And Trump historically pushes things down the road. He kicks the can down the road on what he’s going to deal with. And that creates a fraught situation, especially for these members who are going to go back to their districts and have to explain all of this.

Right.

And while you’re cutting spending, the question that we have to keep asking or are going to be following is also what programs get cut with that. And if you’re looking at $800 billion over 10 years, there’s very few ways to do that without cutting something like Medicaid, providing health insurance for lower income Americans.

Many of which are supporters of the president.

Many of which are supporters of the president as well. And if they were to do that, Democrats, who up until this point have been really cautious in choosing what to swing at when it comes to the Trump administration, I’ve talked to folks who think they have an opening there. And attaching — cutting a government program that many of the president’s own supporters rely on, to this administration.

Right.

Can I just add as well?

Yeah.

In 2018, Democrats were able to coalesce around a message that was focused on the attempted repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act. And that was an incredibly salient issue. And we saw in 2018, Democrats take back the House after campaigning pretty narrowly on that issue. And a lot of Democrats that I’ve spoken to in the past few days think that they have a real opening to use that playbook again, this time on cuts to Medicaid, potentially —

If they happen.

— if they happen. And there’s a real excitement and I think energy around that message that, as Zolan pointed out, we haven’t seen from Democrats in quite some time.

Got it. Back then, Republicans touching the Affordable Care Act backfired for them. And Democrats hope that if they touch Medicaid now, it will backfire once again.

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

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OK, so that was the Congressional dealmaking this week. When we come back, we’re going to talk about the international deal that the president struck.

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We’ll be right back.

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Welcome back, Zolan, Catie, Maggie. We have talked on the show before around this very table about a theoretical deal that Trump had wanted to make with Ukraine that would require Ukraine to basically compensate the US for all the military assistance that the US has given Ukraine in its war against Russia. It started off as very theoretical and notional, but now, it’s becoming an actual reality.

And Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now headed to Washington to make it official on Friday. Zolan, how did this all start and become what it now is?

So we’ve talked about how President Trump’s approach to foreign policy can best be described as transactional. And we got some examples of that early on when, after coming into office, when it came to aid for Ukraine, it started out as sort of a musing over having an exchange of the natural resources in Ukraine for aid to Ukraine. And that has really become a focus of the negotiations that we’ve now seen in recent days and in recent weeks.

So a pivotal point in this is when Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, took a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, and presented an initial version of this deal. And the initial version, Ukraine balked at it.

What was the initial version?

First, the US basically wants back-pay for the aid they already sent to Ukraine. Trump is basically saying, you have these critical earth minerals in Ukraine, and the US is going to get a significant amount, half of the revenue from that up to $500 billion.

That’s a lot.

The maybe even more significant thing is what’s not in that proposal. And that’s the assurance Zelenskyy wants of a long-term security guarantee. The concern for Ukraine is that any pause in fighting that US and Russia agree to. Well, what if Russia uses that to build up its forces, and then Ukraine is left without the assurance, the knowledge that the United States will come to their defense, that the United States will actually support Ukraine.

And it might be left without some rare earth minerals that would help it pay for its own defense if it were to accept this deal. Maggie, how should we understand this initial offer that, on its face, seems like a very good deal for the US, and not much of a deal at all for Ukraine.

I think you just answered your own question. I mean, essentially, Trump has separated out Russia and Ukraine from one another, as he is saying that he is trying to negotiate a peace deal. He’s got Russia at one table with the US. He’s got Ukraine at another table with the US.

A smaller table.

A much smaller table with Ukraine. Trump said it himself, and it’s really true. Ukraine basically has no cards to play. Trump has rejected the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine, and Trump also does not want to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. He wants Europe to do it. And that is going to require a heave of the will by Europeans, and we’ll see what that looks like. So the new deal that is being negotiated —

Because the first one kind of got rejected.

— the first one was rejected, and then other iterations of it were rejected. And then the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, jumped in. And that complicated matters.

Yeah, how do we get to a deal?

So what is now there, because of various forces, is a smaller deal in terms of what the US will get. Trump keeps saying $350 billion. My understanding is the actual number is smaller than that, but it still does not include a security piece. And that was clearly a red line for Trump. And Zelenskyy clearly realizes that and is taking what he can get.

But that doesn’t seem like a deal the president of Ukraine would sign. And yet, Zolan, he’s about to arrive in Washington and sign it. So at some point, he decides that even though he’s not really getting anything from it, it’s still somehow worthwhile. Why?

Well, for one, I mean, a late version of a US proposal did vaguely say that the US would support Ukraine’s security. But then Trump came around the next day in a cabinet meeting and said, essentially, that was going to be the responsibility of European nations that are closer to Ukraine. Zelenskyy is in a really tight spot here. I mean, he knows Ukraine has been relying on a lot of US aid. And he’s now put in a position where, like many other world leaders, he now needs to come to Washington and try to placate Trump, try to use old fashioned diplomacy to try and secure any kind of assurance for Ukraine.

Catie, is this the death, like the official death of anything resembling the conventional Republican approach to Russia and containing its territorial aggression and its previous mandate to protect Ukraine?

I mean, look, over the past seven years I’ve been up on the Hill, I’ve written a lot about the two foreign policy wings of the Republican Party — the traditional Mitch McConnell interventionist —

Protect Ukraine, right.

— right, wing, and at the time ascendant sort of they call themselves realists, restrainers, people who did not want to send sort of US treasure, US troops abroad. And I think what we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, at least when it comes to Republicans in Congress, is that that’s not really a battle anymore. And that the —

It’s over.

It’s over. The anti-interventionists have won. They occupy positions of power in Republican leadership on the Hill. They occupy positions of power within the Pentagon.

And so I think Zelenskyy knows that. He knows that he’s not going to get any more aid from Congress. And so he has to make a deal with President Trump.

Well, to that point, if you subscribe to this ascendant now victorious America-first worldview that has now dominated the party under Trump, isn’t this quite an achievement? The United States is going to recoup the money it spent in Ukraine, with no commitment to spend much more, or to ever put American troops in harm’s way in Ukraine in a war that Trump and many Republicans don’t think the US has a real interest in?

Yes, I mean, this is — look, in a long line of things that Donald Trump promised during the campaign and is doing, this is one. He made very clear that he did not support the aid to Ukraine. Trump also looks at all of these engagements through an economic lens. He does not look at them through a foreign policy end, as some kind of a moral exercise.

He is looking at it as what is the best deal for the US. He sees Ukraine as a tiny country. Russia is obviously not the superpower it once was, but in Trump’s mind, it looms much larger from its stature decades ago. And he sees more business opportunities for the country, as he has said, with Russia than he does with Ukraine.

It’s interesting. Even when the administration is trying to reassure Ukraine that the United States will be here, they actually point to the fact that, look, if we have an investment in your critical earth minerals, that is, in a form, the best kind of security assurance that you could get because we don’t want Russia to take over all of this territory. If we have an agreement with you to continue to financially benefit from these critical earth minerals, isn’t it more likely that we will continue to support your defense of your land, which I think says a lot about Trump.

That’s fascinating.

It says a lot about him.

Right. The best way to get America’s support is to allow us to have a financial interest in you not being overrun by your larger neighbor.

That’s right.

Which in this case, he’s just struck.

That’s right. It’s also worth noting just some of the criticism that’s come from some other European leaders who have said that this does echo colonialism as well. And a colonialist approach where you are looking to extract the resources of a country that you have leverage over or even power over.

I just want to end by asking for a larger reflection on all this dealmaking. We started, of course, in Congress. Now, we’ve gotten to this deal with Ukraine. But if you zoom out even further and you think about all the Trump deals that have been struck since he was inaugurated, you’ve got a deal with Canada on tariffs. You’ve got a deal with Mexico on tariffs.

On top of that, the prime minister of the UK was just at the White House offering Trump a deal of his own to increase the UK’s defense spending, something that as we’ve hinted at here, Trump has asked all European countries to do so that they are less reliant on United States defense spending. And when you think about it, the common thread here is Trump’s allies — and stay with me, this is one of those heady, stretch ending questions — his allies, both within his party and America’s allies across the world, are all kind of bending to him in ways that don’t seem to hew to tradition, or in some cases, to their own best interests.

And just to give you a vivid example of that knee bending and just how vivid it is, right before we started taping, the prime minister of the UK handed Donald Trump a letter from King Charles. And I want to play you that scene.

I mean, just to really summarize what has happened in this scene, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, having basically been summoned to Washington to make sure that Trump knows that he’s willing to have less US security in Europe, and instead that the UK will spend more on its own security, follows up by saying, oh, and by the way, our King wants to have you for dinner. It’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be historic.

The scene is one of kind of — let’s just put it really plainly — self-debasement in the name of impressing Donald Trump.

There was a whole sideshow in the first term when Trump visited the UK and met with the royal family. And there were all these complaints about how he handled himself and some concerns by people around the Royals that they didn’t care for how the Trump entourage was behaving and so forth. And that was all very much on the UK’s terms.

This is all on Donald Trump’s terms and using the British Royal family, which Trump has been enchanted by since childhood — and he credits his mother for that — as a chit. And so this is absolutely a change in tone and a change in approach. And it is definitely a bending of the knee of some sorts. But it is also a reflection of how world leaders have, instead of bristling against Trump trying to set the debate on his own terms, are just essentially saying, eh, the hell with it at this point. And that’s pretty different than the first term. This is a recognition that Trump wants some kind of offering, and this one is pretty clever.

I think we all might have imagined that Trump’s victory in the US meant that there would be lots of dealmaking from within the Republican Party and concessions, but this is something else entirely. These are America’s strongest allies, saying, where do you need me? What do you want? Here’s the deal.

That’s right. Yes.

And it’s just very striking what an extraordinary exercise of power we’re seeing from this president.

I think that’s right. And it’s a little bit of what have you done for me lately approach to foreign policy. And you’re seeing other nations react in a way to try and give him something that he can cite that they’ve done for him lately. And it’s not just today.

The Japanese Prime Minister came to the White House and was showering Trump with compliments, complimenting his appearance on TV. Netanyahu also showered him with compliments. When he threatened tariffs against Mexico —

Right.

— Mexico agreed to new border security measures. You saw Canada also threatened with tariffs and talked about different things they were going to do at their northern border. So you’re seeing Trump make clear what his approach to foreign policy is. And you’re seeing other world leaders respond by giving him something, whether it be something tangible on the ground or simply even the appearance of placating at the White House.

Right. And that can be minerals, literally something from the ground, or it can be dinner with the King.

That’s right.

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Well, one of them is probably more specific to the US economy than the other, but yes.

Well, my thanks to all three of you. Maggie, Zolan, Catie, see you again soon.

Thank you, Michael.

Thanks, Michael.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, everyone. [MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

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Here’s what else you need to know today. In the latest legal setback to the president’s cost-cutting efforts, a federal judge has barred the Office of Personnel Management from ordering the termination of thousands of probationary workers. The judge ruled that the firings, which have occurred across federal agencies, were illegal because, he argued, only individual agencies have the power to hire and fire their own workers. As a result, the Office of Personnel Management, he found, cannot order firings beyond its own staff, as it recently has.

And Republican lawmakers in Iowa have overwhelmingly passed a bill to end the state’s civil rights protections for transgender people. If signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, the legislation would remove trans identity from a list of protected groups that employers, businesses, and landlords may not discriminate against, and would make Iowa the first state in the country to revoke such protections.

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Today’s episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Rachel Quester and MJ Davis, contains original music by Diane Wong, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, and Elisheba Ittoop, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

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