Why President Trump is singularly incapable of negotiating a budget bill

America's master negotiator is in trouble

About those deals ...
(Image credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Unless Congress can get past its differences and pass some kind of budget bill by Friday, the government is going to shut down. Fortunately for us, our new president is a master negotiator, the man who literally wrote the book on dealmaking. With his broad experience and unparalleled insight into human nature, it should be no problem for him to get members of Congress in both parties to arrive at a mutually beneficial settlement.

I'm kidding, of course. In fact, we've already seen that President Trump is actually a terrible dealmaker, at least when it comes to the kind of deals he has to make now.

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.