Posted on October 20, 2026
Unreal Deals
How much is Trump just making up?
by
Daniel Clark
On October
11th, President Trump posted on Truth Social, "Effective immediately, there is
an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!" This was big news, especially to anyone who
was supposed to have been a party to the agreement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said
he was unaware of the deal until he heard about it through the media, but that
he was willing to abide by it if Russian President Vladimir Putin was. Within hours, the Russians launched their
latest missile attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, thus breaking the
agreement, assuming it ever existed. So
where are the consequences that are implied by Trump's warning not to break it? It turns out the word "don't" means as much
coming from him as it does from Joe Biden.
Obviously, there was no energy
ceasefire. It doesn't exist on paper,
neither of the warring parties appears to have been aware of it, and Trump did
not even provide any specifics about what it entailed. It seems he simply tried to impose it into
existence, in an attempt to justify his lifting of sanctions on Russian diesel
fuel by presenting it as part of a broader diplomatic development.
This is
not President Trump's first fabricated foreign policy agreement. Following a trip to North Korea during his
first term, he tweeted, "Wow, we haven't given up anything & they have
agreed to denuclearization." If that
sounds unlikely, that's only because it's untrue. There had been no agreement signed by Trump
and Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator has never been willing to end his
country's nuclear weapons program, and he certainly would not have agreed to
such a thing without any concessions in return.
When Trump
isn't creating deals that are entirely imaginary, he is often adding provisions
that there is no indication of anybody having agreed to. When he was president-elect in 2024, he
discussed border security with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, after which
he announced that she had "agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into
the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border." Sheinbaum responded that not only did she not
agree to close the border, but that she did not even have the capability to do
so. Whose story sounds more plausible?
The
Japanese disagreed with Trump about what his tariff rates on goods from their
country would be, even after the two sides had negotiated a deal. In a real trade agreement, the conditions are
made explicit so that all parties understand what they are. Few of Trump's trade agreements, however,
have ever been ratified. Many of them
are in the form of loose frameworks that are essentially IOUs for more clearly
defined agreements at some point in the future.
Others have never even been written down.
Altogether,
he claimed to have made "200 deals" with other countries, which had supposedly
been motivated by his "Liberation Day" tariffs.
Media fact-checkers seized upon this claim, pointing out that there are
not that many countries in the world, and certainly not that many U.S. trading
partners, but that's getting nitpicky.
The bigger issue is that if these 200 deals exist, the American people
have a right to know about them, just as if they had been properly submitted to
Congress for ratification in accordance with Article I Section 8 of the
Constitution. The president owes us a
full accounting of the provisions of these trade agreements, so where are
they? Of course, he can't account for
the deals because very few if any of them actually exist.
Even President Trump's most
grandiose and well-publicized deals are the stuff of fantasy. Last October, he announced that Israel and
Hamas had agreed to his Gaza peace plan, which in fact neither of them had
done. In the days that followed, leaders
of 29 countries gathered for the Gaza Peace Summit in Egypt to endorse the
deal, in a maudlin scene reminiscent of a 1970s Coke commercial. The most conspicuous absentees were Israel
and Hamas.
This past
January, Trump decided that it was time to move on to Phase 2 of the plan,
Phase 1 having been successfully completed, which of course it had not
been. Phase 1 requires the voluntary
disarmament of Hamas. The terrorist
organization says it will only disarm after the Israelis have withdrawn from
Gaza. The Israelis will not withdraw
from Gaza until Hamas has been disarmed.
Had the principles in the conflict actually been involved in the peace
plan, this conundrum would have made itself immediately apparent, but why let
reality spoil a good deal?
It's not
up to representatives of other countries to enforce our Constitution. As far as they're concerned, when they're
talking to our president, they're talking to the United States of America. For all we know, he could be making
commitments to other countries on our behalf that he never feels the need to
tell us about. For years to come, other
heads of state could come to us expecting concessions they say Trump had made
to them when he was president, and nobody will be in a position to contradict
them.
Whoever
succeeds Trump as president is going to face a serious challenge in cleaning up
his diplomatic debris. There might even
need to be a special investigative committee formed to determine which deals,
or parts of deals, are real or phony, which won't be easy to do once the real
phony dealmaker is gone. Perhaps we
could ask all the other countries what arrangements they had made with Trump,
and then decide whether or not we want to codify them on a case-by-case
basis. Or maybe we should just declare any
deal we don't have in writing to be null and void. If other nations object, we could just tell
them to chalk it up as the final insult of the Trump presidency, and tolerate
it as they usually do.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press