President Donald Trump’s 72-hour stretch from last Friday’s meeting with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska to Monday’s gathering of the most powerful leaders in Europe and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is unrivaled in American history.
No president has ever traveled as far and as fast to meet for meaningful negotiations with such a disparate group of world leaders. The president tossed aside generations of accepted wisdom about summitry and embraced his inner developer’s mantra: Nothing happens until the decision-makers actually get to a real table in a real room.
For as long as he’s been in politics, I’ve urged readers, listeners, and viewers not to forget what a lifetime in high-stakes real estate development teaches those who survive that game: daring, bold moves, the inevitability of failures, and the joy and returns of big wins.
Whether residential, commercial, or mixed-use, big-time development is not for the timid. The personalities on the private sector’s side are enormous, and the money involved is big enough to turn the heads even of the wealthiest.
Getting to “yes” with private partners on a land transaction is only the first step. Getting every jurisdiction involved to “yes” is a yearslong grind that affects scores of government officials at every level: City council members, county supervisors, regional agencies dealing with coastal zones, water runoff, wildlife and fire prevention are all involved, as are state agencies and of course the federal government in the form of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
That’s only a partial list of the number of independently operating government agencies with authority over land use projects. Trump has dealt with them all on both coasts, in between, and abroad.
Some of his deals have cratered. Some have been spectacular wins. That’s about right for the “bigs.” I learned how to deal with deal-makers in a three-decade career as a land use lawyer, mostly in the western states, with an occasional exotic project far away. Lesson one: Lawyers aren’t deal-makers. Lesson two: Developers are usually much more gifted entrepreneurs than lawyers. Lesson three: Don’t kill deals. Do everything you can to make them come to be.
Successful land use lawyers learn how to deal with big personalities with big dreams, lots of cash, and cunning. They also know that risks are real, and their obligation is to advise about risks candidly. Their No. 1 job is to keep the client out of trouble with the law.
Career diplomats and commentators on national security are almost by definition ignorant about large-scale land development and lack the professional humility of a good lawyer. Thus, Manhattan-Beltway “experts” have always underestimated Trump’s skillset and his capacity for risk.
The only modern presidents with remotely similar entrepreneurial backgrounds are the two Bushes. Both of them were also chronically underestimated by the chattering class, which had zero idea of what it means to be an oilman (H.W.) or the owner of an MLB franchise (W). The talking heads never considered that prior professional lives deeply enmeshed in risk-taking would produce operating rules very different from those of the average career politician.
Because academics and journalists have lived relatively protected lives where the risk of complete failure rarely exists (this is changing rapidly for the media but not for the tenured class), they have never been able to shake their condescending attitudes towards these three men, and most especially Trump, who never even played the political game in earnest until 2015.
Similarly, the longtime political operators of old Europe thought they could manage Trump, or dazzle him. But there they were on Monday at the White House, called together by the developer and made to listen.
The world is a bit stunned by Trump 2.0. His deliverables after six months include a devastated Iranian nuclear weapons program that those Europeans had thought inevitable; peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda; and an end (for the present) of combat between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia.
For his friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has delivered the most valuable currency of all: Steady, unqualified American support for the defeat of all of Israel’s enemies.
US AND EUROPE SEEK TO ‘MAINTAIN THE MOMENTUM’ WITH PUTIN THROUGH SPEED
It took half a year for the world to realize that this version of Trump is just as confident but much more experienced than in his first term. He has also swept aside his domestic political opponents, brought the GOP to heel, and dismissed with disdain the collapsing old media.
The White House gathering on Monday was very much about the terrible war in central Europe. It was also, however, a message to the entire world about Donald Trump: Underestimate him at your own peril.
Hugh Hewitt is a longtime conservative commentator and author. He hosts the Hugh Hewitt Show on Salem Radio every weekday from 3–6 p.m.