I’m awful at garage sales.

We did one several years ago, and one of the early scroungers was looking at a table we had priced at $30.

“I’ll give you $20 for it,” he said.

“Ok,” I said.

He looked hurt. He couldn’t decide whether he’d heard right or maybe I just didn’t know how to play the game.

“What would you have said if I’d offered $15,” he asked.

“I would have said, Ok.”

I thought he was going to cry. He wanted to negotiate. I wanted to get rid of a table that had been sitting in the basement for twenty years. If someone hadn’t bought it, it would have gone from the garage to the curb. I got what I wanted. So far as I was concerned, I won.

All of that is to point out that I’m not a natural negotiator. My bottom line is simplicity and some profit. Despite that obvious handicap, I’ve taught negotiations for years, using a model of my own devising. Since I’m not a natural, I’ve probably owned almost every available book on negotiations published over the last twenty or so years.

One of the books I bought was “The Art of the Deal,” supposedly by a real estate guy named Donald Trump. I found it at a library used book sale for $1. I read it and decided that there was nothing in there that I wanted to use. It was full of self-aggrandizement and deceit. That’s not what I thought good negotiations were about. So, I threw the book away, glad that it cost only $1.00.

Later, I read that the writer who was ghosting the book couldn’t get Trump’s attention long enough to cover the subject and simply guessed at what he thought it should say based on the information he had. I doubt that Trump ever read it.

And this is the person who went to negotiate with the dictator of North Korea and is about to negotiate with the president of Russia, both of whom I believe are much smarter and better negotiators than Trump.

Based on my reading of negotiations, Trump routinely violates a bunch of foundational negotiating principles, including the following:

He assumes a lot. He said that he could size up Kim in “probably the first minute.” Yet, he comes out and declares that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat. Weeks later, the US intelligence community says the North Korea has stepped up its nuclear efforts.

He spurns preparation. He said that attitude was more important than preparation (and he obviously believes that). Yet, anyone who has been in negotiations knows that most of these confrontations are either won or lost before the parties enter the room. The one who has the most clearly defined goals, who understands the opposer’s goals, and grasps the opposer’s strengths and weaknesses usually wins. It’s been widely reported that Kim’s goal was to be elevated in terms of status by getting a face to face with the president of United States. Clinton and George W. Bush refused, sending negotiating teams to deal with them.  Trump gave them what they wanted; North Korea won before Air Force One even took off.

He doesn’t seem to understand that winning or losing is in the details. Kim and Trump sat down, chatted, had a couple of photo ops, smiled a lot, and issued a brief, general statement that essentially said both countries would play nice. It had no timelines, no protocols for verification, no…well, essentially no details at all. And with that, Trump declared victory, having made the world safe from North Korea’s nuclear attacks. I imagine he had visions of a Nobel Peace Prize. But better deals had been negotiated by both the Clinton and Bush administrations, more than a hundred pages of details, and North Korea broke those agreements.

  When it becomes personal, you’ll probably lose. Good negotiators keep their eye on their objectives and generally ignore everything else. With Trump, everything is personal. He expects to win by sheer force of personality, just as he expected Canada and the EU to cave in to his wishes at the G-7 conference. As noted by several columnists, the result of his pre-Kim blustering has been to isolate the US from its traditional trading partners, moves that will probably raise prices in this country and cost jobs. It’s already cost the soy bean farmers one of their largest markets.

The results of the much-heralded Trump-Kim sit down was that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is now tasked with getting some sort of real deal between the two countries. After their first meeting, there was a Grand Canyon-wide chasm between the statement issued. Pompeo said “we made progress on almost all of the central issues.” North Korea said that the meeting was deeply regrettable.

As one news story said, “It is feared that the summit’s vaguely worded commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula meant something different in Pyongyang and Washington.” No kidding!

Trump, the self-proclaimed genius, the one with the “best brain,” and the “best words,” is next going to have a face-to-face with Putin, and he plans to do it with no aides and no notetakers. Just Donald and Vlad (and their translators) having a tete-a-tete. I find this worrisome. Although I’m no fan of Putin’s, I recognize that he has managed to stay in power a long time, even as he evaded the Russian constitution’s restrictions on presidential succession. He is, I think, ruthless. And I think he is much smarter than Donald Trump.

We may find that Trumps ineptitude in dealing with North Korea was just an opening act for a real catastrophe. Instead of botching a deal with a small nation (a client state of a much more rational country) who is developing nuclear weapons that will someday have the capability to reach the US mainland, Trump is about to sit down with the leader of a country that has had a nuclear arsenal almost as long as we have.

Since Trump seems to ignore almost all advice, perhaps our only option is to take a leaf from the GOP playbook: thoughts and prayers.

Pray for the Republic.