I referenced this The Washington Post story in my last piece about the TikTok ban, but I wanted to flag this bit on Trump’s obvious Art of the Deal brilliance:

The White House was hours away from announcing a proposal this week to spin off the popular video app TikTok when the Chinese government shattered the idea, saying it would not approve of any deal without first discussing President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade policy, three people close to the negotiations said.

The White House and TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, had agreed to a proposed deal by Wednesday and were preparing to announce it Thursday […].

Trump must be the greatest dealmaker in the world to get China to agree to a sale, and then blow up that sale by imposing 34% tariffs on China on the same day (and then threatening another 50% the next).

Clearly Trump is an n-dimensional chess player, where n is so bigly only Trump can play.

Trump this week mused about the possibility of including the sale in broader negotiations with China amid the escalating trade war.

“I’m a very flexible person,” Trump said. “Maybe I’ll take a couple of points off if I get approvals for something.”

Oh, no, my bad. It’s just his usual Mafia Don approach to doing “business.”