Trump to outline AI priorities amid tech battle with China
President Donald Trump will mark the plan's release with a speech outlining the importance of winning an AI race that is increasingly seen as a defining feature of 21st-century geopolitics, with both China and the U.S. investing heavily in the industry to secure economic and military superiority.
According to a summary seen by Reuters, the plan calls for the export of U.S. AI technology abroad and a crackdown on state laws deemed too restrictive to let it flourish, a marked departure from former President Joe Biden's "high fence" approach that limited global access to coveted AI chips.
Top administration officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House National Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett are also expected to join the event titled "Winning the AI Race," organized by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and his co-hosts on the "All-In" podcast, according to an event schedule reviewed by Reuters.
Trump may incorporate some of the plan's recommendations into executive orders that will be signed ahead of his speech, according to two sources familiar with the plans. Trump directed his administration in January to develop the plan.
The event will be hosted by the Hill and Valley Forum, an informal supper club whose deep-pocketed members helped propel Trump's campaign and sketched out a road map for his AI policy long before he was elected.
Trump is expected to take additional actions in the upcoming weeks that will help Big Tech secure the vast amounts of electricity it needs to power the energy-guzzling data centers needed for the rapid expansion of AI, Reuters previously reported.
U.S. power demand is hitting record highs this year after nearly two decades of stagnation as AI and cloud computing data centers balloon in number and size across the country.
The new AI plan will seek to bar federal AI funding from going to states with tough AI rules and ask the Federal Communications Commission to assess whether state laws conflict with its mandate, according to the summary.
The Trump administration will also promote open-source and open-weight AI development and "export American AI technologies through full-stack deployment packages" and data center initiatives led by the Commerce Department, according to the summary.
Trump is laser-focused on removing barriers to AI expansion, in stark contrast to Biden, who feared U.S. adversaries like China could harness AI chips produced by companies like Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and AMD (AMD.O), opens new tab to supercharge its military and harm allies.
Biden, who left office in January, imposed a raft of restrictions on U.S. exports of AI chips to China and other countries that it feared could divert the semiconductors to America's top global rival.
Trump rescinded Biden's executive order aimed at promoting competition, protecting consumers and ensuring AI was not used for misinformation. He also rescinded Biden's so-called AI diffusion rule, which capped the amount of American AI computing capacity that some countries were allowed to obtain via U.S. AI chip imports.
In May, Trump announced deals with the United Arab Emirates that gave the Gulf country expanded access to advanced artificial intelligence chips from the U.S. after previously facing restrictions over Washington's concerns that China could access the technology.
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The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Ghislaine Maxwell is talking – but what can she tell and can she be believed?
Early one afternoon in April 2016, Ghislaine Maxwell got so angry that she struck a table. Maxwell, who was facing a defamation lawsuit from the late Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre Roberts, was being deposed by attorneys and seemed to grow incensed during questioning. 'I am going to put on the record, Ms Maxwell very inappropriately and very harshly pounded our law firm table in an inappropriate manner,' said Roberts's attorney Sigrid McCawley. 'I ask she take a deep breath, and calm down. I know this is a difficult position, but physical assault or threats is not appropriate – so no pounding, no stomping, no, that's not appropriate.' 'Can we be clear, I didn't threaten anybody,' retorted the British socialite, who in 2021 was convicted of sex trafficking in relation to Epstein. Maxwell's attorney, Jeffrey Pagliuca, came to her defense: 'Stop, you made your record, there is no dent in the table. I don't see any chips.' The heated deposition would ultimately prove damaging for Maxwell. When she was charged in 2020 for inviting unsuspecting teen girls into Epstein's predatory orbit, she also faced two perjury counts for allegedly providing false information 'under oath' during litigation. Although prosecutors said they would drop these perjury counts if she didn't get a retrial in her sex-trafficking case, Maxwell's statements about Epstein – and whether they can be trusted – are once again at the forefront of national news. Twice this week, Maxwell met with the deputy US attorney general, Todd Blanche, as Donald Trump continues to contend with the political uproar over his justice department's handling of files related to Epstein, who died in jail six years ago as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges. Epstein, whom prosecutors said abused girls as young as 14, had for years counted numerous powerful men among his associates – including Trump and Prince Andrew, whom Roberts accused of sexual misconduct in relation to Epstein and who has denied any wrongdoing. Trump for weeks has faced political fallout over a justice department memo claiming there was no Epstein client list, and its decision not to release extensive case documents despite Trump's campaign promise to do so. Meanwhile, Congress – specifically the House's oversight committee – has also subpoenaed Maxwell to testify. As the controversy continues to swirl, report after report has shed light on Trump's friendship with Epstein, which reportedly ended several years before the financier was arrested on prostitution charges in Florida. But it is Maxwell – again – who finds herself at the center of a political and media firestorm, as Trump seeks to assure his Maga base that he is telling the truth when he says he had little contact with Epstein and was unaware of his crimes. What exactly Maxwell's meeting with the Department of Justice, or her testifying to Congress, will uncover remains unclear. It's also unknown whether Maxwell's sit-down will do anything to help her: she is serving a 20-year sentence for enabling Epstein's abuse. After the second meeting with Blanche on Friday, Maxwell's lawyer, David Oscar Markus, told reporters: 'Ghislaine answered every single question asked of her over the last day and a half. She answered those questions honestly, truthfully, to the best of her ability. She never invoked a privilege. She never refused to answer a question.' The attorney Alan Dershowitz, who represented Epstein in Florida criminal proceedings where he pleaded guilty to state charges including soliciting a minor for prostitution, said Maxwell was still key to understanding what exactly transpired. 'Maxwell knew Epstein intimately for many, many years. She was his girlfriend, she was his chief assistant,' said Dershowitz, speaking before Maxwell's meeting with the justice department. 'She would be the one who arranged the travel for people when I had to come down to argue cases for him or appear in front of the state attorney or the US attorney. 'She knows where all the bodies are buried.' He noted that prosecutors often exchange time in prison for information, including in organized crime cases. 'If they really want to get to the bottom of all this, they should make a deal with her – and the deal is an obvious one,' he said, describing it as a 'win-win for everybody' if she was freed, granted immunity and testified to Congress. While Maxwell does have intimate knowledge of Epstein, Dershowitz said this did not mean any meeting or testimony would implicate others. She could, for example, tell Blanche there were other accusers but that she believes them to be liars. Whether her evidence implicates people or appears to clear them, neither might be trustworthy by itself, he said. 'Whatever the inculpatory material is has to be checked and has to be verified. You can't just put out accusations.' Roberts and Dershowitz sued each other over Epstein-related allegations; in 2022, she dropped her suit, and both agreed not to sue again. Dershowitz has denied all allegations of wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. There are various ways Maxwell could receive a reprieve. Prosecutors could ask the judge to reduce her sentence for assisting with the prosecution of others, or Trump could commute her sentence or grant a pardon. 'I suspect it's really just window dressing or distraction to try to avoid having to release any significant Epstein-related documents,' said the defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman. 'Maxwell had the opportunity to speak with the feds when she was under indictment and apparently chose not to because she claimed she was innocent. 'What is she going to be providing now, at this point?' Indeed, it remains unclear what Maxwell might tell authorities that could lift the veil on Epstein. Before her trial, her attorneys said so much time had passed that key witnesses had died and key evidence was inaccessible. Prosecutors also said in court that they had not offered Maxwell a plea deal – and that her team did not request one. Kevin Faga, a veteran defense attorney, said that if Maxwell wound up signing a cooperation agreement, then prosecutors could request a resentencing. While it's up to the judge, Faga said, 'in my experience, judges pay a lot of attention to these types of requests from the government' because they believe there's a public interest in providing assistance 'so that other wrongdoers can be prosecuted and punished'. In other words, if Maxwell were to simply tell authorities that prosecutors got the case wrong, that would probably not help her. 'Cooperation doesn't work that way,' Faga said. 'That's not providing substantial assistance to the government.' There's also the matter of Maxwell's problematic deposition – striking that table. 'If the government previously charged her with perjury, then it makes her a very questionable witness,' Faga said, 'and a witness that the government may deem just too unreliable to accept cooperation from.'
Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Milei's bet on China threatens an ugly fallout with his idol
When firebrand libertarian Javier Milei was campaigning to be president, he vowed that under his watch Argentina would not engage with 'decadent communists' like the Chinese, branding their leaders murderers and thieves. But 18 months is a long time in geopolitics. Milei, one of the few world leaders to attend the presidential inauguration of his political hero Donald Trump in January, has performed a remarkable political U-turn. On Monday, Milei rewrote the visa rules to make it easier for Chinese people to visit or work in Argentina. A week earlier, he unlocked a $5bn (£3.7bn) China-backed hydroelectric project in the country's south, which had been fractiously frozen since before he took office. And in April he renewed a currency swap arrangement with China, worth about 35bn yuan (£3.6bn) – a move that prompted an alarmed White House to dispatch Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, to Buenos Aires to deliver a dressing-down. By cosying up to China, Milei is risking his idol's ire. What has changed? Economics vs politics On the campaign trail in 2023 Milei told Argentine voters: 'I am not going to do business with any communist.' He has previously branded the country a 'bloody dictatorship'. But by last December he was having a sit-down with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rio, and said he was up for a trip to Beijing. 'If you compare Milei during the campaign to Milei as president, he has softened his views on many, many issues. One of them is China,' says Bruno Binetti, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a think tank. 'He is adapting to the realities of governing, without this affecting his core beliefs and identity.' While Trump and Milei might be political soulmates – radically anti-woke, anti-regulation, anti-net-zero – Argentina cannot do without China's appetite for its exports, nor its investment into areas like mining and energy. 'If you want the economy to grow, if you want to show that Milei's economic model can generate growth, then you need good ties with China,' Binetti says. Milei has tried to separate this economic need from Argentina's wider political and diplomatic relationships, from his radical reform agenda – which has won him admirers worldwide, including Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader. He has refused to join the anti-Trump Brics group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. 'We must separate the geopolitical question from our commercial question,' Milei told the Wall Street Journal last year. Trading and economic relationships should be driven by business and he would not be 'meddling in whatever the private sector decides'. But economics and politics don't separate so easily, particularly in Trump's binary, zero-sum world. Peter Lamelas, Trump's nominee as the next ambassador to Argentina, told a US Senate committee hearing this week that his mission was 'to reduce the malignant influence of opposing powers' in Latin America – and that includes China. 'Argentina is essential, critical to opposing authoritarian regimes like Venezuela and China,' he said. Jim Risch, a Republican senator and the committee's chairman, urged Lamelas to fight China's 'expanding influence' in the region and to 'reduce China's technological and financial influence in Argentina'. Snubs and dealmaking This was not an exchange the two men might have anticipated having. When Trump returned to power, Milei – whom the American calls 'a friend' and 'my favourite president' – would have been at the very bottom of the White House's list of leaders to worry about. Not only was Milei at Trump's inauguration, but he came back a month later to publicly present Elon Musk, then setting up his department for government efficiency, with a version of his trademark bureaucracy-slaying chainsaw. The gift – which was inscribed with Milei's catchphrase 'Long live freedom, dammit!' – was handed over at a Conservative Political Action Conference, where Milei also met Trump. The two leaders discussed Argentina's 'groundbreaking economic reforms', according to a White House readout. Milei was back in the US yet again in April, heading to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort for the 'American Patriots Gala', where he picked up an award recognising his 'unwavering dedication to freedom, market economics and conservative values'. But this time, Trump was unavailable. Supposedly a problem with the US president's helicopter prevented him from getting to Florida in time to catch Milei on this flying visit. That wasn't the only snub. The day before, Trump had unveiled his 'liberation day' tariffs – and there was no exemption for Argentina from the 10pc worldwide hit. Today, Trump's Aug 1 trade-deal-or-tariff deadline is looming and there is not yet any sign of any agreement with Milei that might ease the pain for Argentina's soy and beef exporters. By contrast, in early May several Chinese officials visited Buenos Aires to sign a deal to buy $900m of Argentine soybeans, corn and vegetable oil. The White House did reportedly help Argentina to secure a new $20bn loan programme from the International Monetary Fund in April. Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump's special envoy for Latin America, said he hoped this might supplant the Chinese currency swap agreed at almost the same time. 'What we would like to see, eventually, is the end of the famous line of credit Argentina has with China,' he said. 'That line of credit is extortionate, and as long as they maintain that line of credit, China will always be able to extort.' Beijing shot back. 'Fair-minded people are able to tell who is extorting and coercing others and making trouble,' said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian. Balancing act Milei will probably try to keep the two superpowers in some kind of balance. But both will be looking to use carrots and sticks to tip favour their way. China seems to be making most of the running right now, and has ambitions to get further ahead of Trump. A Chinese official told the Argentine newspaper Clarin earlier this year: 'We're doing well, but not as well as we'd like'. If Beijing is appealing to Milei's pragmatism, Washington can count on his passion. His friendship and ideological affinity with Trump will likely stop the scales from tipping too far towards China. 'Milei sees himself clearly as a global leader figure in a Right-wing, pro-West, pro-market movement. And his alignment with Trump is a big part of that identity – it makes him feel part of something bigger,' Binetti says. 'You'd think that given Milei's symbolic role in some Trumpist circles in the US, he would get a little bit more leeway.' If Milei's rapprochement with the Chinese continues to deepen, he might end up testing just how far that leeway extends.
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The key to understanding Trump? It's not what you think
Donald Trump embodies dealmaking as the essence of a particular form of entrepreneurship. Every deal begins with his needs and every deal feeds his wants. He thus appears to be like other super-rich people: seemingly bottomlessly greedy, chasing the next buck as if it is the last buck, even when they have met every criterion of satiation. But Trump is different, because his brand of greed harks back to an idea of leadership that is primarily about adversarial dealmaking, rather than about innovation or improved managerial techniques. Trump's entire career is built on deals, and his own narcissism is tied up with dealmaking. This is because of his early socialization into his father's real-estate dealings in and around New York. Real estate in the United States, unlike the money-making modes of super-rich individuals in other countries, relies on deals based on personal reputation, speculation on future asset values, and the ability to launder spotty career records. Profits and losses over time can be hard to identify and quantify precisely, as Trump's auditors and opponents have often confirmed, since profits, which depend on speculation and unknown future value, are by definition uncertain. Trump's incessant boasts about being an apex dealmaker casts light on almost every aspect of his approach to his presidential decision-making. Numerous observers have long cast doubt on Trump's image as a consummate dealmaker, pointing to his many failures in his long real-estate career, his abortive political and diplomatic deals, his backsliding and reversals, and his overblown claims about deals in progress. But these criticisms miss the point. Deals, whether in finance, real estate, or in any other part of the economy, are just one step in the process of reaching full-fledged, binding agreements subject to the force of law. They are a stage in the negotiation process that has no force until it is finalized as a contract. It is, at best, an agreement to agree, which can turn out to be premature, poorly conceived or unacceptable to one or other party. Put another way, it is an engagement, not a wedding. A deal allows a negotiator like Trump to claim victory and blame the other party or some other contextual variable if things do not work out. In fact, in the hands of someone like Trump, deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets. Trump does not like markets, precisely because they are impersonal and invisible. Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure. Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete, they are perfect grist for Trump's relentless publicity machine, and allow him to polish his brand, massage his ego and signal his prowess to opponents – without the regulations and measurable consequences of regular market risks. The downside risk for an aborted or interrupted deal is negligible, and the upside is guaranteed by the legal power of fully completed contracts. Trump has figured out to an exceptional degree that dealmaking does not need to be successful in order to massively increase his wealth. Whether or not true, his claims to successful deals are the key to his brand and profitmaking worldwide, either directly or through the business endeavors of his sons. These range from his latest Trump perfume and Trump mobile telephone services, his Maga accessories, Trump golf courses around the world, his real estate and resorts, and of course his highly profitable cryptocurrency holdings. In every case, his deals either lead to further deals, which service his branding machine, or they lead to direct increases in his personal and corporate wealth. Deals, successful or not, are Trump's magic means to amass money and feed his avarice. Avarice is a vice with a long history in Christian theology. It is widely defined as an excess of greed, an inordinate level of greed, an insatiable greed. It has been viewed by economic historians as a passion that must be curbed and replaced by calculated, moderated self-interest in order for the rationality of the modern market to function as a dominant economic principle. From this perspective, greed can have numerous objects – such as food, sex and power – whereas avarice is single-minded in its focus on money. Trump exemplifies this focus. Though he has to function in a world where avarice is meant to be regulated by the market mechanisms of price and competition, he has managed to successfully pursue his avarice with little obstacle. This driving desire defines Trump's 'egonomics' – the intimate connection between his narcissistic urges and his wish for increasing his stock of money. The governing principles of his economic policy have nothing to do with America getting its due, as his messaging about tariffs argues, or about restoring dignity to the working class, as he signals to his Maga base. Nor are they about power or prestige. The object of everything he does is money, and in the service of the boundlessness of money, which Trump has made the defining object of his desire. Other commodities are of interest to him only insofar as they serve his desire to acquire, hoard and increase his stock – of money. The first – and most soothing – theory is that Trump wants money to buy power – more of it, perhaps all of it. More power than China, than his generals, than Harvard. We all know power – via our parents, our teachers, our bosses, our police. It is a force we understand, a pull we recognize. If Trump only wants more of something that many people have, and even more want, he is legible, he is like us. But power for what? To do what? To get what? Perhaps he is chasing an unassailable place in history, both human and eternal. So then it is not just power he endlessly chases, but glory. For this we have some evidence in the clownish thesaurus of words that he uses to describe his achievements, his looks, his wit, his wisdom, his all-round superhumanity: best, most, only, incredible, ever, more. In this orgy of superlatives, he is always curled high up in the clouds, like a Maurice Sendak toddler. But since Trump, from his perspective, brooks no real competition in life, in politics, in real estate, or even in history, there can be no glory for him which is not tainted by the mediocrity of his competitors. And true glory usually requires some form of self-sacrifice, some sense of compassion, some ability to transcend oneself. Given his woeful deficits in these areas, the glory game cannot be the key to understanding Trump. And so we go to a more familiar space: the realm of prestige, status and stardom. This realm is wired into competitions, tournaments and casinos of every sort, where winning is well-defined, losing is for losers and there is usually only one survivor and one winner who takes all. The competition for status is as old as recorded human history and accompanies every human society that has had leaders and followers, more and less skilled competitors for food, shelter and sexual partners. It begins with simple rules for coming out on top and evolves over time into the most elaborate forms of status competition, often driven by males – including wartime exploits, trophy wives, palatial homes and bottomless conspicuous consumption. These tournaments of value can be observed in settings as disparate as auctions, horse races, philanthropic gifts and corporate mergers and acquisitions. There is widespread consensus among thinkers from many eras and regions that status is a limited good, which has its own economics of supply and demand, distinct from those of pecuniary gain. This insight looks, at first, like the key to Trump. But attractive as this argument may seem, it too is a red herring. Among Trump's own tactics, the one he loves to use most is tariffs. Trump's obstinate insistence on tariffs as the key to restoring American manufacturing, swelling the US treasury and reducing American consumer prices has flummoxed most mainstream economists. Tariffs are for Trump the ideal way to combine dealmaking, status-grabbing and his penchant for money as its own bottomless value. It is evident that Trump's understanding of the trade-offs of globalization is rudimentary and often internally contradictory. Indeed, he shows signs of believing that making deals of any sort requires only outsize confidence, charismatic force and bottomless access to financial backing. In fact, Trump's view of himself as an incomparable dealmaker (a claim at odds with his many entrepreneurial disasters) conceals his deep distaste of real markets – in which a large apparatus of binding promises, the tendency to stable price equilibria, and the connection of supply and demand through pricing – can frustrate his brand of deal-making, which is always oriented to maximizing his personal prestige. Trump's deep-seated desire to be the winner who takes all in the global prestige economy sheds some light on his weaponization of tariffs. We can catch a glimpse of this logic in a most unlikely context. It was captured in detail by one of the fathers of British social anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski, in his 1922 book on a unique trading system that he found in the Trobriand Islands of Oceania, on several trips there in the years between 1915 and 1917. This anthropological classic, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, casts new light on Trump's tariff mania. What Malinowski described is a system of trading across about 18 coral islands within a 175 sq mile (453 sq km) area, between 'big men', leaders of lineages who exchanged highly specific valuables (such as decorated shell necklaces and bracelets) and their counterparts in this network of islands. Called the kula system, it had a highly codified set of rules to hedge voyagers against oceanic weather dangers and hostile groups in other islands, some of whom were cannibals. The goods appropriate to kula exchange could never be hoarded, marketed or bartered like normal utilitarian goods. This was a strictly ceremonial system geared to enhancing the prestige of male elites, of moving these well-known objects in a circuit which could last for years. The diplomatic rituals of these exchanges were ensconced in an atmosphere of pretend hostility between the parties, often because other groups in these islands were real enemies, always poised for real warfare. Hanging on the knife-edge between trade and war, these exchange circuits were strictly distinguished from barter or money transactions (what we would today call market transactions). The kula system was a way of organizing exchange, averting war, signaling prestige and making allies through a tightly regulated flow of valuables outside market exchange circuits. Trump does not care about Malinowski, the Trobriand Islands, non-capitalist exchange systems or 'big man' politics in kinship-based polities. But his operating system belongs in this type of diplomatic world, one that requires nothing except a non-negotiable interest in winning deals. Trump's onslaught of tariffs, falling on everyone like nuclear ash, is meant to make him the king of the global prestige market, no matter the cost to diplomatic traditions, financial markets, customer capacities or fair balances of trade. Trump appears to be undistracted by any other economic priority outside the aim to be the apex dealmaker. The kula system is grounded in a non-monetary system of honor, prestige and reciprocity, which helps us understand Trump's tariff strategy but does not fit his narcissist drive to crush all his fellow players. Even the kula system is about relationships. Trump is strictly about winning deals. So we must beware of seeing the urge to dominate all prestige markets as Trump's bottom line. Trump's bottom line is money. Being an avaricious man, Trump worships money – both its power and its pomp – and he seeks it through his extensive networks of children, clients, tax lawyers and cronies, all devoted to the increase of his wealth. This pecuniary drive has a transcendent, epic and unquenchable force which cannot be explained by reference to the other things that money can buy. Even his quest for prestige through arm-twisting tariff deals is primarily about positioning himself to secure future deals in his individual capacity. His is a special brand of avarice. There is no better way to explore the ways in which Trump's various egonomic strategies come together than in the recent invention and propagation of cryptocurrency, which has spawned a shadow world of speculators, fraudsters, legal hucksters, elected and unelected lobbyists. Their usual victims are vulnerable citizens, low-level grifters, pensioners, badly informed investors and other natural prey. The entire industry lives in a gray economy, attached to mainstream markets, assets and regulators like the tiny remora fish that feast off sharks. It survives in a legal twilight zone, where its currency is accepted only by some businesses as legal tender, and where smart players use pump-and-dump tactics to make fast profits with short-lived 'coins' of various kinds. Whatever the utility of cryptocurrency in the real world of goods and services, it is mainly a tool for amassing wealth by gambling on its future convertibility to real money in specialized currency exchanges. Cryptocurrency puts Trump in the position of being a player and the owner of a casino-like system at the same time, so that he always wins, if not in one role, then in the other. The outrageous self-enrichment schemes of Trump and his family in the crypto industry, which have been carefully exposed in several media outlets recently, establish new frontiers for Trump's shameless violation of even the simplest norms about conflict of interest. The best example of these ventures is his memecoin, $Trump, which has made him and his close associates a fortune by selling access to Trump through a barely regulated crypto mechanism. By some estimates, Trump has gained several billions of dollars in his net worth through his crypto ventures, which combine nepotism, influence-peddling and dealmaking in a unique package. Through cryptocurrency, Trump has found the ultimate way to attach his core impulse – avarice – to the larger machinery of the markets. There is some truth to the argument that Trump wants more of everything he can get, including power, glory and prestige. But what he wants more than anything else is money, which is just a temporary token of more money, and more money for ever more. The unique instinct behind Trump's avarice, which sets him apart from other billionaires who continue to chase wealth, is that he has found a way to build his fortune through deals – whether deals that make him money by inflating the value of his brand, which can then make him more money through more deals, or through the enforceability of completed contracts. Through his dealmaking, Trump has managed to triumph over the market, making it work for him to amass greater and greater sums of money, whether his deals are seen through to fruition or not. We can summarize Trump's approach to markets by adapting a famous sentence, spoken by him, about how he grabs women: Trump grabs markets by the deal. Illustrations by Joao Fazenda
