The Transactional Presidency

How Trump’s Zero-Sum Worldview Is Remaking America and the Global Order

By Dr. Wil Rodriguez

TOCSIN Magazine

I. THE ART OF THE DEAL BECOMES THE ART OF GOVERNANCE

In the opening pages of his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump laid out a philosophy that would, nearly four decades later, define his approach to the most powerful office in the world. For Trump, who co-wrote the book, every transaction is zero-sum, with a clear winner and loser. What worked for building casinos and licensing his name to hotels would become the operational framework for American foreign policy, domestic governance, and the very concept of public service.

The question is not whether Trump operates transactionally—his own special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, explicitly acknowledged that “President Trump approaches diplomacy and engages in a very transactional manner, with economics as the foundation and driving force behind international affairs.” The question is what this transactional approach means for a democratic republic supposedly founded on the principle that government exists to serve the common good rather than enrich those who temporarily hold power.

The numbers tell a staggering story. According to a New Yorker analysis, Trump’s crypto ventures, real estate deals, licensing agreements, and other business activities have netted the Trump family $3.4 billion over the course of his time in politics. This is not historical retrospective—this is happening now, in real time, as policy decisions are made, diplomatic relationships are forged, and the full weight of presidential power is deployed in ways that consistently align with Trump family financial interests.

According to investigative reporting by The New York Times, Trump’s conflicts of interest in his second term have surpassed those of his first term, as he is “no longer hesitant about pursuing profits without restraint.”

The presidency has been monetized. The only question is whether Americans will recognize what they’ve lost before it’s too late to recover it.

II. THE ARCHITECTURE OF SELF-ENRICHMENT

To understand the transactional presidency, one must first understand its mechanisms—the specific channels through which public power converts into private profit. According to PBS reporting, if foreign governments or wealthy individuals want to curry favors with the president, there are four main avenues: cryptocurrency, new real estate deals, Trump Media which runs the president’s social media app TRUTH SOCIAL, or direct payments at social clubs, hotels, and golf courses.

Consider the sheer audacity of this architecture. A sitting president maintains active business interests in cryptocurrency—one of the most volatile and least regulated financial sectors, rife with opportunities for insider advantage and market manipulation. He continues to develop real estate projects in countries whose leaders he meets with as head of state. He owns a social media platform that serves as his primary communication tool with the American public while simultaneously functioning as a commercial enterprise subject to foreign investment and market pressures. And he operates private clubs where membership—priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars—grants access to the president of the United States.

Each of these channels operates in what ethics experts would call a “gray zone” of legality. Nothing is technically illegal, in part because the rules governing presidential conflicts of interest were designed for an era when basic norms of propriety prevented elected officials from engaging in such brazen self-dealing. The Founders created checks and balances to prevent tyranny; they never imagined a president who would treat the office as a franchise opportunity.

The Middle East provides the most glaring example. President Trump visited three Middle Eastern nations where his family has deep business ties, and over the past month, billions of dollars have poured into Trump-owned companies, reviving longstanding questions about whether the financial windfalls are influencing policy.

The timeline is impossible to ignore: Trump announces Middle East peace initiatives. Trump family businesses announce major deals in Gulf nations. The Trump administration announces arms sales and security commitments to those same nations. The president insists these are unrelated developments—pure coincidence that American foreign policy consistently aligns with Trump family financial interests.

This is not governance. This is a protection racket dressed in the formal protocols of diplomacy.

III. THE ZERO-SUM DELUSION

The philosophical foundation of Trump’s transactional approach rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how both democracy and international relations actually work. In Trump’s worldview, borrowed from his experience in commercial real estate, every deal has a winner and a loser. Success means extracting maximum value for yourself while giving away as little as possible. Relationships are temporary alliances of convenience, to be maintained only as long as they serve immediate interests.

Just over a week into his second term, Trump boasted about bringing a more transactional approach to his relationship with world leaders, and many showed they were eager to make the deals he treasures.

But democratic governance is not—cannot be—zero-sum. When a president negotiates a trade agreement, the goal should not be to “beat” the other country but to create mutual benefit that strengthens both economies. When a president maintains alliances, the objective is not extracting maximum tribute but building collective security that protects all members. When a president makes policy decisions, the measure of success is not personal profit but public welfare.

The transactional mindset corrupts these fundamental purposes. Allies become supplicants who must pay for American protection. Trade partners become adversaries to be defeated. Policy decisions become opportunities to reward friends and punish enemies. And the American people—who elect presidents to serve their interests—become bystanders to transactions conducted for the benefit of the president and his family.

The psychological appeal of transactionalism is obvious: it is simple, decisive, and appears to produce concrete results. Trump can point to specific deals, specific dollar amounts, specific concessions extracted from foreign leaders. But this apparent concreteness masks a deeper failure: the erosion of relationships, institutions, and norms that cannot be rebuilt with a single transaction.

When Trump treats NATO allies as deadbeats who need to “pay their fair share,” he may extract increased defense spending—but he also undermines the trust and commitment that make the alliance effective. When he approaches climate agreements as bad deals to be renegotiated or abandoned, he may save American industries from regulation—but he also forfeits American leadership on the defining challenge of the century. When he views international institutions as forums for extracting advantage rather than building cooperation, he may achieve short-term victories—but he accelerates the collapse of the global order that has underwritten American prosperity for seventy-five years.

The transactional approach appears strong and decisive. In reality, it is profoundly short-sighted, sacrificing long-term strategic advantage for immediate gratification. It is the geopolitical equivalent of strip-mining: extracting maximum value from existing assets while destroying their capacity to generate future returns.

IV. THE GLOBAL LEARNING CURVE

The world has spent nearly a decade learning how to navigate Donald Trump’s transactional worldview—and the results are mixed at best.

Foreign leaders have discovered that flattery works better than diplomacy. As one European diplomat put it, “With Trump, there’s no such thing as statecraft. There’s only dealcraft.” Praise him publicly, offer a symbolic concession, and you might secure favorable treatment. Challenge him, and you become an enemy.

This dynamic has produced a curious inversion of traditional power relationships. Authoritarian leaders—from Vladimir Putin to Mohammed bin Salman—have proven remarkably adept at manipulating Trump’s vanity and profit motives. They understand that policy positions can be shaped through personal and financial incentives rather than diplomatic argument or moral appeal. Meanwhile, traditional allies who rely on shared values and institutional cooperation have found themselves marginalized, bewildered by the disappearance of stable norms.

Consider Trump’s approach to NATO. When European leaders sought reassurance of continued U.S. commitment to collective defense, Trump responded with invoices. When the United Nations appealed for humanitarian funding, Trump treated it as a business negotiation. When allies expressed concern about human rights violations in countries where Trump had business interests, they were dismissed as hypocrites or ingrates.

In each case, the underlying logic was the same: relationships are expendable; everything is negotiable; the only currency that matters is leverage.

This might work in the short term—extracting concessions, winning applause from domestic audiences tired of “unfair deals”—but it exacts a devastating long-term cost. By redefining international engagement as transactional, Trump has effectively told the world that American commitments are conditional, temporary, and for sale.

The consequence is not simply reputational. It is structural. Other nations are adapting accordingly, forming parallel alliances, diversifying economic relationships, and hedging against American unpredictability. In the process, the global order that once revolved around U.S. leadership is fragmenting into a collection of competing transactional networks—each driven by immediate interests rather than shared principles.

V. DOMESTIC TRANSACTIONALISM: THE HOME FRONT

What makes the transactional presidency even more corrosive is how thoroughly it has reshaped domestic political culture. The logic of the deal has seeped into every corner of governance.

Cabinet positions go to the most loyal rather than the most qualified. Pardons become tools of patronage. Legislation is negotiated as if it were a business merger, with benefits distributed not according to public need but to political allies who can offer something in return—campaign funds, endorsements, or public loyalty.

Even the judiciary, once viewed as a branch insulated from overt political trade, has become part of the transactional machinery. Judicial appointments are treated as bargaining chips—rewards to the Federalist Society for ideological loyalty, tokens to religious groups for electoral support.

This is not politics as usual. It is the reduction of governance to barter.

The moral cost is staggering. Citizens who once believed in civic duty, in the idea that service to the nation transcended self-interest, now watch leaders flaunt their enrichment as proof of success. Corruption no longer hides in shame—it markets itself as savvy.

And because transactionalism rewards power, not principle, those who play the game best are those least constrained by conscience. The result is an accelerating erosion of the public sphere: truth becomes negotiable, accountability optional, and loyalty the only remaining currency.

VI. THE CULTURE OF TRANSACTIONALISM

Beyond politics and diplomacy, the transactional ethos has seeped into the cultural bloodstream of the nation. Trump’s genius—if one can call it that—lies not in inventing this mentality but in embodying it so perfectly that millions recognize themselves in it.

Americans live in an era of personal branding, gig economies, and monetized attention. Every interaction, from social media engagement to professional networking, carries a price tag or potential advantage. Trump did not create this world; he merely translated it into governance.

In doing so, he exposed the uncomfortable continuity between neoliberal capitalism’s glorification of self-interest and the corrosion of democratic norms. The difference between a reality television star selling access to his persona and a president selling access to his power is one of scale, not principle.

This normalization of transactional thinking has consequences far beyond the political arena. It transforms education into credential markets, healthcare into profit streams, and citizenship itself into a series of conditional entitlements. The idea of the common good—the moral foundation of any democracy—becomes an anachronism, replaced by the language of cost-benefit analysis.

Even morality becomes transactional. “They’re not perfect, but they fight for us,” becomes the rationalization for every ethical compromise, every act of cruelty, every betrayal of democratic decency.

VII. THE COST OF THE DEAL

There is, of course, a seductive simplicity to Trump’s worldview. It promises clarity in a chaotic world: make a deal, win the deal, move on. It rejects the ambiguities and compromises that make democracy messy and diplomacy slow. It rewards visible results over invisible principles.

But history offers a warning. Republics that reduce politics to transaction eventually lose the capacity for trust, empathy, and solidarity—the emotional infrastructure that sustains free societies.

When every policy becomes a payoff, every alliance a contract, and every public good a private opportunity, the connective tissue of democracy decays. Institutions cease to mediate between power and principle. Citizens cease to see themselves as participants in a shared project. Politics becomes performance; leadership becomes brand management.

Trump’s defenders argue that his approach simply acknowledges reality—that politics has always been transactional, and he merely stripped away the hypocrisy. But this argument misses the point. The hypocrisy, in its way, was essential. It maintained the pretense that leaders were supposed to serve something larger than themselves. Once even that pretense is abandoned, nothing remains but appetite and leverage.

VIII. A NATION OF DEALMAKERS

The deeper danger of the transactional presidency is not merely that it enriches one family or distorts one era. It is that it reshapes national identity itself.

The American experiment has always contained contradictions between idealism and self-interest, between the rhetoric of liberty and the realities of power. But never before has the balance tilted so decisively toward the latter.

In Trump’s America, success is no longer measured by contribution or character, but by extraction—how much one can get from others, how cleverly one can manipulate the system. Patriotism is redefined as loyalty to the dealmaker, not the democratic ideals he claims to defend.

This transformation will outlast Trump himself. His worldview, amplified by media and rewarded by markets, has become cultural common sense. Even those who despise him often unconsciously adopt his logic: measuring worth in transactions, framing morality in terms of gains and losses, treating every relationship—including political allegiance—as temporary and negotiable.

If the republic survives this phase, it will be because enough citizens rediscover that democracy is not a transaction but a covenant—a shared promise to act together for purposes larger than personal advantage.

IX. THE FINAL RECKONING

History will judge Donald Trump not merely for his policies, but for the moral economy he normalized. His transactional presidency has forced America to confront a question as old as democracy itself: can a nation built on commerce and competition sustain the virtues required for self-government?

If the answer is yes, it will be because citizens, institutions, and future leaders rediscover the meaning of service—a word almost extinct in Trump’s lexicon. If the answer is no, it will not be because Trump broke America, but because he revealed how easily Americans could be persuaded to sell it.

REFLECTION BOX

What This Era Reveals: The Trump presidency is not merely a political event—it is a moral mirror. It exposes the degree to which America’s institutions, citizens, and global partners have come to accept transactional logic as inevitable. To resist it is not to reject strength or pragmatism, but to reclaim the idea that power can serve principle rather than profit.

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