The truth is Trump is a bad negotiator. He's easily played. He's also predictably dishonest. The only real move is to string him along, which he seems to be glad to do, particularly if someone flatters or threatens to punch him.
The Chinese understand. Notice how there are no soybean purchases from China this year. They do not trust the US on important things like food.
Plenty of great negotitors across history did, too. Trump gets played. Repeatedly. Predictably. His political instincts have been sharp enough that I'm increasingly chalking this up to age, but maybe he just had a better team around him the first time around.
I've always had high regard for Trump as a talented scumbag grifter of note.
He's been noticeably and increasingly off game since it seemed he was only campaigning for re-election to avoid a mountain of looming bad legal outcomes.
Much of his early second term "wins" I've marked as momentum success from having a ready to go game plan care of the Project 2025 crowd. His carry through on tariffs, dodging Epstein complications, handling free speech issues, etc. have been more chaotic than cunning.
That's not a good thing. Lots of farmers going bankrupt now.
Again... He's done this twice now.
It's an musing irony that Japan is a demographically much older society than the US and LDP in particular looks like a gerontocratic party, but between factionalism and parliamentary instability they actually cycle through leaders pretty efficiently