Donald Trump Shouts Loudly and Fumbles a Big Stick

President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the presidency as a “bully pulpit,” which could be used to persuade legislators to embrace his sweeping policy agenda, from environmental legislation to antitrust protections. To Roosevelt, the word “bully” meant “superb” or “excellent.” Today, the term has taken another meaning. 

President Donald Trump bullies through coercion, threats, and retribution to serve his interests.

Increasingly, some of Trump’s tried-and-true tools for coercion are backfiring on him. In stark contrast to Roosevelt’s advice to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” Trump is barking loudly but has apparently fumbled his threatened stick.

The unexpected common link between Trump’s recent setbacks, from the surrender of his demands to own Greenland, to his shifting explanations for his seizure of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, to the spreading outrage over the indiscriminate brutal cruelty of ICE raids around the nation, is that they represent the simultaneous failure of Trump’s typical intimidation tactics. In our book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, we identify 10 of Trump’s favorite go-to leadership tools. Several of these tools have been failing Trump amidst recent setbacks.

Negotiate through aggression

Trump’s first go-to leadership tool is to begin every negotiation by assaulting the other parties. Trump tends to open any negotiation with audacious demands, insults, and threats. Most negotiation experts recommend building a foundation of trust as if you were building a fire: you ignite tinder, branches, kindling, and finally toss on a bigger log once the blaze is established.

But instead of building trust, Trump likes to begin by shattering it, believing that later terms offered will look reasonable compared to the suffering initially threatened. Over the past year, this approach has worked for the President, even if it came at the cost of shattered trust. A fury of confusing, seemingly self-destructive trade sanctions helped him achieve a handful of trade deals. And this strategy also helped Trump in getting fellow NATO members to better share the burden of defense costs. 

But in the case of Greenland, Trump’s aggressive opening move—his insistence on owning all of Greenland—for military bases and rare-earth mineral recovery backfired. When Trump threatened a hostile military seizure, financial markets revolted across both U.S. stock and bond markets; and eloquent, dignified, principled European leaders such as Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz joined with Canada’s Mark Carney to denounce such threats to Denmark and Greenland with unexpected force and unity. Indeed, Trump managed to accomplish what has been impossible since Charlemagne: somehow, accidentally unite all of Europe against him. 

Faced with this daunting collective opposition, Trump stepped back his claims about Greenland. Instead, he has been left to celebrate the opportunity to reopen many of the same military bases the U.S. had been granted back around the WWII era, but subsequently walked away from. Similarly, he touted the idea of investing heavily in an expensive and difficult mineral-extraction plan, which is ironically exactly the investment Denmark and Greenland have been eager to secure.

Similarly, Trump’s aggressive opening moves, such as his attacks on public officials like Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, have failed. Even Powell’s most scathing critics have come to his defense, voicing their belief that while they had policy disagreements with Powell, he is no criminal. 

Divide and conquer 

Another go-to tool that has fallen similarly flat recently is Trump’s reliance on “divide and conquer” techniques to dilute alliances he finds threatening. 

For instance, Trump has used this approach to try to splinter the business community by singling them out one-by-one. He has attacked iconic companies such as Bank of America, Boeing, Comcast, Merck, NVIDIA, JP Morgan, and many others. But this approach has started to backfire on Trump—with businesses collectively countering his one-off intimidation and calls for boycotts. 

One example of how Trump’s divide-and-conquer tactics have fallen flat can be seen with the blowback over ICE raids in Minnesota. While Trump’s immigration crackdowns have targeted blue states one by one—perhaps to prevent collective resistance from forming— business leaders from Minnesota-based companies like Target, Cargill, and 3M have collectively called for a “de-escalation” of tensions, calls which were subsequently echoed by groups such as The Chamber of Commerce and The Business Roundtable. Now, Trump has removed ICE commander Gregory Bovino from Minnesota and called for an “honest” investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti. 

That pattern echoed earlier unified dissent from the business community over the costs and damages of Liberation Day’s reckless country-by-country reciprocal tariffs, as called out by the National Association of Manufacturers and other trade groups, which resulted in Trump quickly suspending his planned tariffs for 90 days to allow for time to reach negotiated deals. 

These examples are powerful reminders that in the face of divide-and-conquer, appeasement does not work. The only way to stand up to divide-and-conquer is to engage through collective action, focusing on fighting fire with facts without sinking to the level of personal insults. 

Repeat false information 

Trump’s third go-to tool has also failed him: his reflexive reliance on repeating false information, hoping that it may eventually gain traction. In academic research, this is referred to as “the sleeper effect.” But in the case of Minnesota, the public did not fall for Trump officials telling people to ignore their own eyes. Citizens watched the brutal killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They saw the detentions of peaceful protesters and non-criminal immigrants falsely labelled as “terrorists.” 

And Americans have not forgotten that Trump promised to release the Epstein files on the campaign trail. Not doing so has eroded the potency of Trump’s sleeper effect. It is undeniable that only a fraction of the Epstein files have been made public.

Similarly, Trump’s fictional justification for invading Venezuela, a sovereign albeit hostile neighbor, that it was at the behest of the strategic needs of the US oil industry, was refuted by the industry leaders themselves. Oil executives directly declared that they had no advance knowledge of the invasion, and CEOs such as Darren Woods of Exxon Mobil called Venezuela uninvestible to Trump’s face. They insisted that not only the antiquated, corroded infrastructure and volatile, dangerous government were disincentives, but even the Venezuelan heavy crude oil was of little interest because it cannot be easily refined for gasoline. Plus, oil markets are suffering a supply glut, leading to plunging market prices, massive layoffs, and the elimination of oil rigs. Given all of this evidence, Trump’s “drill baby drill” mantra has fallen on deaf ears.