How a 1987 Bestseller Became a 2025 Tariff Doctrine

Trump’s Tariff Playbook Was Written in 1987

There are moments in history when a book written decades earlier unexpectedly reenters the national conversation—not because it holds timeless wisdom, but because it captures the worldview of a man whose influence refuses to fade. In the case of Donald Trump, that book is The Art of the Deal, a brash, swaggering volume ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz in 1987, offering a peek into the mind of a man who would one day wield enormous political power.

I didn’t read The Art of the Deal when it first came out. I wasn’t thinking about real estate, Manhattan power plays, or casinos. I didn’t follow Wall Street, and I certainly wasn’t considering how any of it might someday intersect with global trade wars. My formal study of math ended in high school with advanced algebra, and I never took an economics class. But I was always a reader—an English major, a book club member, someone who turns to words when the world doesn’t make sense. And lately, it hasn’t.

Trump’s sweeping tariffs on China, Vietnam, and the European Union—along with the sudden 90-day pause he issued after markets tanked—felt like chaos to me. And chaos has a strange gravity. In trying to make sense of it, I picked up The Art of the Deal hoping that, buried beneath the bravado, I’d find something illuminating about how he thinks. I wasn’t expecting an economics textbook. I got a political cipher.

What I discovered wasn’t a masterclass in trade policy or a roadmap to modern international negotiation. It was something else entirely—an early autobiography of a man who governs not through strategy, but through spectacle. The book is less about deals and more about deals as drama: the theater of persistence, the performance of dominance, and the story you tell after you’ve worn everyone else down.

Nearly 40 years later, that same show is playing out on the world stage. And as odd as it may sound, The Art of the Deal helps make sense of it all.

“I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing”

One of the most telling lines in the book isn’t about real estate at all—it’s about temperament. Trump, or rather Schwartz channeling Trump, writes that the key to his success is relentless ambition. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after,” he declares. “Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases, I still end up with what I want.”

This sentiment, which might sound like harmless entrepreneurial bluster, becomes more sobering when you see it applied to economic policy affecting millions. Trump’s initial 2025 tariff package certainly aimed high: a 20% tax on imports from the European Union, 46% on Vietnam, and a stunning 145% tariff on China. These weren’t tactical adjustments. They were seismic declarations—impossible to ignore, intended to provoke.

The rhetoric echoed the book. The actions followed its logic. Push first, push hard, and let others react. When China retaliated, Trump doubled down. When the market recoiled, he paused—but only after sending a message. He wanted the world to know he wasn’t afraid of escalation, even if others were. The push, not the result, was the point.

“I don’t hire a lot of number-crunchers”

Perhaps the most chilling line in The Art of the Deal is one that feels almost quaint in its anti-intellectualism: “I don’t hire a lot of number-crunchers, and I don’t trust fancy marketing surveys.” Trump prefers gut instinct. He says he conducts his own informal polls, listens to people around him until a “gut feeling” emerges, and then acts decisively.

In most contexts, this kind of homespun decision-making would be dismissed as unserious. But in the hands of a president, it becomes national policy. Trump’s refusal to heed economists, CEOs, or even his own advisors is not new—it’s just scaled up. As stocks plummeted following the tariffs, and experts warned of long-term instability, Trump remained confident. His gut told him it was working.

When asked about the 90-day pause, he told reporters he had written the Truth Social post “from the heart.” That phrasing alone should be enough to send economists into cardiac arrest. Yet for his supporters, it affirms something else: authenticity. He’s not operating from spreadsheets or strategic briefings. He’s doing what feels right.

It’s worth noting, though, that the “heart” is not always a moral compass. In Trump’s book, the emotional center isn’t compassion—it’s conquest. And conquest doesn’t require numbers.

“All’s well that ends well”

The ending of one chapter in The Art of the Deal reads like a shrug. After a drawn-out legal battle with tenants at 100 Central Park South, Trump failed to evict them—but ultimately made more money because property values rose. “All’s well that ends well,” he writes.

That same breezy confidence is evident in his current economic messaging. As criticism of the tariffs mounted, Trump urged calm: “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well.” When bond markets steadied, he celebrated it as proof of success. The chaos, in his eyes, wasn’t failure—it was just a prelude to profit.

This attitude—the refusal to acknowledge cost, harm, or disruption—has defined his approach to everything from trade to foreign policy to public health. What matters isn’t whether people suffer in the meantime. What matters is that he gets to claim the win.

“We won by wearing everyone else down”

Trump tells a story in the book about acquiring property on West 34th Street in Manhattan. The key, he says, wasn’t cleverness or compromise—it was endurance. “In the end, we won by wearing everyone else down,” he writes. “We never gave up, and the opposition slowly began to melt away.”

That, in essence, is the Trump tariff doctrine. Exhaustion as leverage. He doesn’t need to win every round. He just needs to last longer than the other guy. That’s why he’s now boasting that 75 countries have reached out to renegotiate. Not because the policy was flawless—but because they got tired of the fight.

And that, perhaps, is the truest expression of his strategy. It’s not about planning. It’s about attrition. The winner isn’t the smartest or most prepared. It’s the last one standing.

The power of the tangible

The Art of the Deal fixates on physical things: concrete, glass, hotel facades, building materials. Trump muses about marble color, design symmetry, and the feel of a lobby. There’s something almost old-fashioned about it—a fetish for the tactile, the visible, the monumental.

It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s economic focus has returned to physical goods. Manufacturing, factories, steel—these are not just industries to him. They are symbols. Symbols of power, of masculinity, of America before the cloud and the gig economy. He wants jobs people can see. He wants products stamped with “Made in America.” He believes, still, in a world of factories over fintech.

This may explain why he speaks so dismissively of Wall Street while invoking Main Street as his moral compass. Even though his own policies—like tax cuts and deregulation—have heavily favored the investor class, he still brands himself as a champion of the blue-collar worker. Tariffs, then, aren’t just economic tools. They are stage props in his performance as populist hero.

“Even bad press is good press”

Throughout the book, Trump complains about media coverage. But he never suggests walking away from it. On the contrary, he admits that attention—even negative—is essential. “From a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks,” he writes.

That same philosophy guides his political life. He may attack reporters, dismiss coverage as “fake news,” and accuse outlets of bias, but he feeds on the attention. Every headline about his tariffs, every op-ed predicting doom, is part of the spectacle. He thrives on being the story.

And the more outrageous the move—the higher the tariff, the bolder the threat—the more coverage he gets. His press secretary recently claimed the media “missed the point” of The Art of the Deal. On the contrary, they’re living inside it.

The book as blueprint

In the end, what’s most striking about The Art of the Deal isn’t how outdated it feels, but how current. The patterns, the language, the tactics—they’re all still in play. The book isn’t just an artifact of 1980s capitalism. It’s a primer for understanding Trump’s worldview in 2025.

He sees the world as a place to be conquered. He values persistence over precision, headlines over harmony, and dominance over diplomacy. He doesn’t believe in compromise—only in outlasting. And he doesn’t care whether the numbers add up, as long as the story sells.

That may not be a sustainable economic philosophy. But it is, undeniably, a winning narrative—for a certain audience, in a certain era, where drama has replaced deliberation.

If the tariffs seem confusing, destabilizing, or self-defeating, that’s because they aren’t meant to solve problems. They’re meant to tell a story. A story that began long before the tariffs, and long before the presidency—in the pages of a book written by a man who never really stopped selling himself.

And in that story, facts are flexible, consequences are background noise, and everything always ends well—because he says it does.