Donald Trump ‘Isolated,’ Suffering ‘Frustration’ Over Self-Described Dealmaker’s Failure To Make Shutdown Deal

Donald Trump has long claimed to be one of the world’s most highly skilled dealmakers. He even parlayed the claim into a bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, which has remained so popular that it earned him a six-figure royalty payment in 2017, 30 years after its initial publication, as the Inquisitr has reported.

But his business record and now his record in the Oval Office have revealed his claim of extreme dealmaking proficiency to be a hollow one, according to Bloomberg News opinion editor Timothy O’Brien — who also wrote a 2005 biography of Trump.

“Trump, in reality, was never a peerless or even a particularly skillful dealmaker, and many of the most significant business transactions he engineered imploded,” O’Brien wrote on January 7.

“Instead, he made his way in the world as an indefatigable self-promoter, a marketing confection and a human billboard who frequently licensed his name to buildings and products paid for by others.”

And nowhere has Trump’s “inept dealmaking” been more evident, O’Brien wrote, than in the ongoing government shutdown, which enters its record 26th day on Wednesday. Trump has demanded that Congress pass a spending bill that includes more than $5 billion for the border wall that he promised his supporters during his 2016 presidential campaign — a wall that both experts such as those at The Cato Institute and even experienced smugglers who make millions off of crossing the border on a regular basis say has no chance of being an effective deterrent, according to the Texas Tribune.

Watch a CNN compilation of dozens of instances in which Trump has boasted about his dealmaking skills, in the video below.

Trump’s complete failure to make a deal that would reopen the government has left him “isolated” inside the White House residence and “prone to flashes of frustration about his inability to get Democrats to buckle,” according to a report published Monday by the Washington Post, citing two anonymous Trump advisers.

“He isn’t in love with this shutdown, but he needs the wall,” the Post report quoted one of the anonymous advisers as saying.

Nonetheless, Trump has maintained a public stance of confidence, even posting a message to his Twitter account last Saturday claiming that he does, in fact, have “a plan on the Shutdown.”

But Trump did not specify any details of his supposed “plan,” or how he would implant it, making only the cryptic statement, “To understand that plan you would have to understand the fact that I won the election, and I promised safety and security for the American people. Part of that promise was a Wall at the Southern Border. Elections have consequences!”