Trump and the art of 'dealism'

His acolytes are discovering that it's not so much about any particular policy as having blind faith in the man himself.

- Jemima Kelly

"I never get too attached to one deal or one approach" — words attributed to a certain Donald J. Trump in 1987. "For starters, I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first."

You might think it pointless to try to come up with answers to what exactly is going on in the mind of the US President by referring to a book ghostwritten for him some 38 years ago. And yet, perusing through The Art Of The Deal — as many people, friend and foe appear to have been doing of late — is the closest you can get to making sense of Mr Trump's mindset.

"My style of dealmaking is quite simple and straightforward," he explains at another point. "I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I'm after."

But while the book might provide a lens through which we can better understand Mr Trump's psychology, his trademark style of transactional, winners-and-losers statecraft — or how his administration has descended into quite this degree of chaos in less than 100 days — it does not exactly provide any kind of blueprint for American leadership. Think less Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger, and more If I Did It by OJ Simpson (albeit without the stuff about hypothetically committing murder).