Victor Davis Hanson opened a Daily Signal monologue in October 2026 with a complaint he has heard for a decade. Donald Trump is bombastic. He says wild things. He demands what sounds ludicrous. People are shocked. They criticize him. Then the talks go on. He comes away with a slight edge, which Hanson put at maybe 52 or 53 percent of the original ask. A deal is signed. Trump, Hanson said, is careful not to insult the person across the table. He may even say he was taken. He walks off with one hard gain. Critics then admit the result and still hate the method. Hanson asked whether that hatred is fair. His answer is the lesson.
Here is the idea, and it is the only one. Negotiation is an art you can watch, and Trump’s version is worth enjoying because the sequence is visible and, on Hanson’s board, it works. The shout is not the deal. The deal is the small edge that remains after the volume drops. An entrepreneur who only hears the shout will copy the noise. An investor who only prices the shout will pay for a theater ticket. Study the pause. Study the close. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or to mimic a head of state in a private contract.
The sequence, in his words
Hanson laid the method out as a set of steps, not a mood. First the partner is thrown off balance. The opening demand is too large on purpose. The shock is part of the bid. Criticism follows, and he does not treat the criticism as a stop. The talks continue. The close is not the crazy number. The close is a bit more than half the opening, a 52 or 53 in his figure, against whatever the other side thought the talk was about when it began. Then he protects the other side’s face. He does not gloat. He may claim he lost a little. The accomplishment is allowed to look smaller than the headline.
That last step is the one amateurs skip. They think the art is the insult. Hanson says the art includes the refusal to insult once the paper is near. A founder who humiliates a supplier at the signing does not have a supplier. A fund that tweets the victory before the wire lands does not have a close. The loud part buys attention. The quiet part keeps the counterparty in the deal. Enjoy the loud part as craft. Do not fund it as if it were the asset.
Panama, and the pause
Hanson’s first case is the canal. He said that when Trump returned to office, Chinese-affiliated companies sat at the entries and exits of Panama, which he called a strain on the canal treaty, with larger designs on the waterway. Trump railed. He threatened to go in. He said the canal should come back to the United States. Then, in Hanson’s phrase, a pause, and negotiation. Marco Rubio goes down.
Look at the shape, not at a map you have not been shown. The ludicrous line is “we take it.” The operational line is a cabinet officer on a plane. Hanson does not, in this talk, read out a signed clause. He treats the threat as the thing that moved a file that had been stuck. An investor should mark that limit. A threat that changes a meeting is not yet a change in control of a port. The art is real if the pause produces a term you can read. The art is a speech if the only product is the speech. Hanson believes the first. You are allowed to wait for the page.
Greenland, and the volume knob
His second case is the one that shows the knob. He recalled that in the Second World War the United States held Greenland because Denmark had been overrun, then gave it back. For years after the Cold War, he said, the island was inert. Trump’s opening was that Denmark could not hold the Arctic against Chinese and Russian interest, and that maybe the United States should just take it. Denmark was furious. Germany, in his telling, sent a handful of soldiers. Denmark talked about money for Greenlanders and about putting their flag on a coat of arms. Hanson called that the start of the move.
Then the part he wants you to hear. Trump turned the rhetoric down. A deal followed, which Hanson says is far better than the 1951 arrangement. Europe, in his score, is relieved because an ally will be in that Arctic. Greenland, he says, gets a military economy without a crowd of Americans. Denmark keeps the sovereignty it can cite. Three parties leave with a sentence they can repeat at home. That is a close, if his account of the deal is right. The opening was “we take it.” The close was a stronger presence, a local benefit, and a flag that did not change. The distance between those two sentences is the art. Anyone who bought the first sentence as policy bought the theater.
Canada, and the bid you do not mean
Hanson then turned to Canada, and he was explicit that the wildest line was not a wish. Trump, he said, has talked about Alberta as a fifty-first state, or about the whole country. Hanson does not think Trump wants that, and he does not think Trump’s voters want it. A Canada of about 40 million people, governed as it is now, would be, in his line, another California. The bid is useful because it is not the destination.
What Hanson thinks the destination is, he put in the future tense. This matters. He did not say the trade deal is signed. He said that when it is done, and after Prime Minister Mark Carney has whatever prize he wants, Canada will cut a deal. He cited a trade dependence he put at 80 percent with the United States. He said Ottawa would stop being a route for Chinese metal to slip around U.S. tariffs, would drop a content rule he put at 5 percent on American digital firms, and would buy more American farm goods. He also said Canada has run a surplus he called $50 billion “forever,” has missed its NATO spending mark for 20 years, and has a weak industrial economy, the weakest of the industrial West in his phrase. He added a population figure, that 45 percent are first- or second-generation immigrants. Those are his charges. They are not a filing.
The entrepreneur’s use of this case is narrow. A shocking alternative can reset a talk that was stuck on one tariff line. It works only if you do not actually want the alternative, and only if the other side can tell, by the end, that you do not. If you did want Alberta, the line would not be a tactic. It would be a threat of annexation, and this article is not an argument for that. Hanson called it the art of the deal again. The test is the contract he says is coming, not the map he says nobody intends to draw.
NATO, and the polite failure
The fourth case is the one Hanson uses to answer the demand for manners. Allies had agreed, first loosely and then more formally, to spend 2 percent of national income on defense. He said that in 2017 only about six were there. He added that the figure ignores what the United States does not bill the alliance for. Logistics. Intelligence. Shared bases. Barack Obama, he said, got angry enough to call the laggards free riders, and still did not move them. Trump threatened the alliance itself. By the time he left, Hanson said, the ratio had flipped. Only a handful were still short. In the second term the ask rose to 5 percent. Hanson says they are starting to go along. He tied the pressure to the years in between, the invasion of Ukraine, and a German-Russian gas pipeline he says he warned against.
His question to the room is simple. Would a softer voice have been nicer? Obama and Biden, in his view, did not get the spending. The abrasive voice did, or started to. You can reject his score of who spent what. You should not miss the structure. A reasonable ask, repeated politely, can become furniture. A ruder ask, attached to a real walk-away, can move a budget. The walk-away has to be believable. A bluff that everyone has watched you fold is not a tactic. It is a discount.
What an entrepreneur should copy
Copy the order. Know the number you will actually sign before you say the number that makes them flinch. If you do not know the second number, the first one will trap you. You will have to pretend you meant the shout, or you will be caught retreating with nothing. Hanson says Trump gets a slight edge and lets the other side keep a story. That is a professional close. Greed for the whole opening bid is how talks die. Fifty-two percent of a large move, signed, beats one hundred percent of a demand that never leaves the microphone.
Copy the pause. In the canal story the pause is a person getting on a plane. In a company the pause is a term sheet, a site visit, a lawyer who is boring on purpose. Drama does not draft clauses. If you cannot point to the quiet step, you do not have a negotiation. You have a post.
Copy the face-saving. Hanson says Trump does not insult the partner in the deal, and may say he was taken. That is not modesty as a personality. It is how you get a second deal. Vendors, landowners, offtakers, and governments all have to go home and explain the signature. Leave them a sentence. If your win requires their humiliation, you have priced one transaction and lost the relationship that makes the next one cheap.
Enjoy it. The enjoyment is not bloodlust and it is not party feeling. It is the pleasure of watching a craft you can diagram. Shock. Criticism. Continuance. A smaller close. No insult. A result the critics have to describe even while they hate the tone. Hanson ends on the question he opened with. Would you rather have someone abrasive who accomplished these things, or someone smooth, and he names Obama and Clinton, who in his view did not? For a person who lives on signed paper, the question is even cleaner. Would you rather be liked in the first meeting, or paid in the last one?
What an investor should not fund
Do not fund the shout. A junior company that “takes a Trump approach” by issuing a wild resource claim, a wild offtake boast, or a wild lawsuit threat has copied the first step and none of the rest. There is no Rubio getting on a plane. There is no volume knob being turned down. There is no 52 percent close. There is a headline. Headlines are not cash flow.
Do not fund a bluff the speaker cannot survive. Trump can threaten a canal or an alliance because the United States can, in fact, change those facts. A promoter cannot. If the walk-away would bankrupt the speaker, the other side will wait. Hanson’s method assumes leverage. Leverage is not a tone of voice. It is an alternative that is real, and that you are willing to use, and that you are also willing not to use once the edge appears.
Do not confuse his victory lap with a ledger. He closed by saying there are no Chinese or Russians left in Latin America, that Canadians are getting angry at their prime minister, and that many now talk about changing immigration, euthanasia, what he called green madness, and socialism. He then said, “We’ll see.” Greenlanders, he said, are happy. NATO, he said, is stronger than it has ever been. Latin America, he said, has its first chance in his lifetime at governments that are consensual and pro-Western. Some of that is score-settling. The Canada deal, in his own verbs, is still ahead. The NATO 5 percent is “starting.” The canal story stops at a visit. Enjoy the method. Audit the closes one by one. An art that works is still an art that has to be scored in documents, not in the last paragraph of a monologue.
What would make this reading wrong
The reading is wrong if the slight edge never shows up on paper. Then the method is a temperament, and Hanson has praised a style. Watch Panama for a clause, Greenland for a text you can set beside 1951, Canada for a signed trade change rather than a prediction, and NATO for budgets rather than pledges. If those pages are empty, the shout was the whole product.
The reading is wrong if you enjoy the insults more than the close. Hanson says the insults stop. A follower who keeps them going after the signature has left the method. That person will get one win and a room that will not sit down again.
The reading is wrong if you think the art removes risk. A 52 percent edge can still be a bad edge if the original ask was aimed at the wrong asset. Craft in negotiation does not fix a bad business. It only means you paid a little less, or were paid a little more, for whatever you were already willing to touch.
The idea, once
Victor Davis Hanson described Trump’s deal-making as a sequence. A wild demand. A room knocked off balance. Talks that continue anyway. A close around a 52 or 53 percent edge. No insult of the partner. A result that is real enough to annoy people who hated the noise. He walked the sequence through the canal, Greenland, Canada, and NATO. Some of those closes he treats as done. The Canadian one he still puts in the future. The pattern is what he wants judged, not the manners.
Negotiation is an art, and this version is one to observe and enjoy, because it works when the shout and the signature are kept apart. Entrepreneurs should copy the order, the pause, and the face saved at the end. Investors should pay for the edge that survives the quiet, and should not pay for the loud first bid. The shout is not the deal.
A note on sources and limits
The method, the 52 or 53 percent figure, and the cases of Panama, Greenland, Canada, and NATO are from Victor Davis Hanson’s Daily Signal monologue “The Genius Behind Trump’s Art of the Deal,” circulated in transcript in early October 2026. His counts, his history of the 1951 Greenland arrangement, his trade and surplus figures for Canada, and his claims about alliance spending are reported as his. They are not re-audited here. Nothing in this piece is investment, legal, or diplomatic advice. A negotiating style can fail. Readers should read the underlying agreements before treating any of these closes as finished.