*The president has offered frameworks, pledges, handshakes and threats — a style that carries growing legal, economic and diplomatic risks.*
*Joshua Green for Bloomberg News*
Donald Trump became a celebrity, and then a two-time president, on the strength of his reputation as a dealmaker. “Deals are my art form,” he boasts in his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.”
By Trump’s reckoning, he’s blazed through the first year of his second term by pumping out deals at such a furious clip that the rest of us can only marvel in amazement. “I’ve made 200 deals,” he told TIME in April, a mere three months into his term. A month later, the White House credited him with “locking in over $2 trillion in great deals.” Over the summer, Trump touted a veritable deal-of-a-lifetime with Japan that will, in his telling, shower the US with cash. “We’re taking in $550 billion,” Trump claimed on CNBC. “That’s like a signing bonus that a baseball player would get.”
But one year into Trump’s second term, the catch in this supposed frenzy of dealmaking has become hard to miss. Many of his deals aren’t “deals” at all, at least not as the term is typically understood: legally binding agreements with clearly stipulated terms that are documented on paper and willingly accepted by all parties. Instead, they’ve tended to take the form of pledges, frameworks, handshake agreements, shakedowns, memoranda of understanding, or otherwise opaque, informal, or incomplete arrangements that fall short of a formal deal, yet still allow Trump to claim a quick victory and move on to the next thing.
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*The president has offered frameworks, pledges, handshakes and threats — a style that carries growing legal, economic and diplomatic risks.*
*Joshua Green for Bloomberg News*
Donald Trump became a celebrity, and then a two-time president, on the strength of his reputation as a dealmaker. “Deals are my art form,” he boasts in his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.”
By Trump’s reckoning, he’s blazed through the first year of his second term by pumping out deals at such a furious clip that the rest of us can only marvel in amazement. “I’ve made 200 deals,” he told TIME in April, a mere three months into his term. A month later, the White House credited him with “locking in over $2 trillion in great deals.” Over the summer, Trump touted a veritable deal-of-a-lifetime with Japan that will, in his telling, shower the US with cash. “We’re taking in $550 billion,” Trump claimed on CNBC. “That’s like a signing bonus that a baseball player would get.”
But one year into Trump’s second term, the catch in this supposed frenzy of dealmaking has become hard to miss. Many of his deals aren’t “deals” at all, at least not as the term is typically understood: legally binding agreements with clearly stipulated terms that are documented on paper and willingly accepted by all parties. Instead, they’ve tended to take the form of pledges, frameworks, handshake agreements, shakedowns, memoranda of understanding, or otherwise opaque, informal, or incomplete arrangements that fall short of a formal deal, yet still allow Trump to claim a quick victory and move on to the next thing.
[Read the full essay here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-23/why-trump-s-trade-and-greenland-deals-aren-t-always-real-deals?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2OTE2NjQ2NywiZXhwIjoxNzY5NzcxMjY3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUOUJBR1lLR0lGUTcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.ROY6S4dlV5ipcmjLg3az267KbbyMk67OpViUaTp4n6g)