“Nobody knows the system better than me,” President Donald Trump crowed while accepting the Republican nomination in 2016, “which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens …”
Only a corrupt New York City developer like him, Trump was arguing, could root the corruption out of D.C. This was a theme of his 2016 campaign.
“I was a businessman. I give to everybody,” Trump said during a Republican debate in August 2015. “When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.”
Trump put it a bit more colorfully in a January 2016 speech: “I have given to everybody, because that was my job. When I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass, okay?”
The Iowa crowd applauded.
Ten years later, Trump is on the other side of the table, but the same theme persists. Consider the president’s recent social media post heaping praise on Tim Cook, the retiring CEO of Apple.
“For me it began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First Term,” Trump said of Cook on Truth Social. “He had a fairly large problem that only I, as President, could fix.”
Trump continued to praise the CEO for lobbying him directly rather than hiring a professional inside-the-Beltway lobbyist.
“Most people would have paid millions of dollars to a consultant, who I probably would not have known, but who would say that he knew me well. The fees would be paid but the job would not have gotten done,” the president wrote. “When I got the call I said, wow, it’s Tim Apple (Cook!) calling, how big is that? I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’”
This particular ass-kissing relationship has continued, according to Trump: “He makes these calls to me, I help him out (but not always, because he will, on occasion, be too aggressive in his ask!), and he gets the job done, QUICKLY, without a dime being given to those very expensive (millions of dollars!) consultants around town …”
Thus, in Trump’s narrative of his arc from businessman to president, he has gone from the asker to the asked, but throughout it is his rear end that is being kissed. He formerly wielded his wealth so that politicians would smooch his derriere, and now he wields his governmental power to secure against his backside the lips of various masters of the universe.
This is the key that the observer can use to unlock the sometimes confusing mess of official actions and public comments of our president.
Here’s the rule: Trump will adopt the policy that maximizes the incentive of powerful people to kiss his ass. This, by the way, is the charitable interpretation of Trump’s behavior. The less charitable version is that he wants to maximize his ability to extract bribes from governments, companies, and other politicians, an interpretation corroborated by the business success of his family members and his crypto undertaking.
But also considering Trump’s narcissism, it is useful to assume Trump is at all times butt-kiss-maxxing.
Trump sometimes likes tax cuts and sometimes likes tax hikes. He will massively increase federal spending, and he’ll campaign on massive cuts to federal spending. What drives him isn’t any ideology or policy framework, but maximizing his own leverage.
Trump even suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which interferes with “the art of the deal,” after all.
His foreign policy, too, is best understood as an effort to elicit butt-kissing.
One reason Trump wants friendships with dictators and strongmen in Russia, North Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines is that he wants to make deals with everyone, and these autocrats have unilateral authority unbound by law or politics.
One reason Trump keeps our allies at an arm’s length is that he favors arm’s-length negotiations over intimate alliances. Negotiations are transactions where you can always demand more and more, and alliances are relationships where norms of reciprocity are expected.
It’s how he conducts trade policy, too. Last April, Trump announced he would bar the export of NVIDIA microchips to China, but then reversed course in August and allowed the export in exchange for a 15% cut to Uncle Sam from the sales.
And it’s one reason he loves tariffs. Trump unilaterally controls many tariffs (and controlled more before a recent Supreme Court ruling), and tariffs inherently come with all sorts of exemptions, differing rates, and other tweaks. Severe government control over many companies’ profits, with tons of presidential discretion involved? There’s nothing better for bringing the boys to the yard.
Which brings us to one of Cook’s successful kisses of Trump.
Last year, Trump placed a 100% tariff on all semiconductor imports, but together with Cook, Trump soon announced that Apple would be allowed to import semiconductors tariff-free. Apple stock instantly rallied, gaining back trillions in market value.
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Had there been no tariffs, there would have been no call from Cook and no fawning Oval Office photo op.
Conservative governance, with minimal government intervention and uniform neutral rules, would do nothing for Trump. Inconsistent, fickle, and transactional — that’s the style of governance that maximizes butt-kissing.