Donald Trump calls himself the ultimate dealmaker. The record says otherwise.

His breakthrough deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with Iran collapsed when Iran hardened its position.

His agreement for Hamas to disarm in Gaza fell apart when Israel rejected the precondition.

His domestic nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia unravelled after he added a demand about recognising Israel by social media post.

Even fixing the Washington reflecting pool went wrong.

This is not bad luck. It is what happens when someone treats running a country like running a private company. Public administration is not private administration, and markets alone cannot solve national problems, something Trump's own record now proves.

The only major objective he has consistently delivered is tax cuts for the wealthy. Everything else, from foreign policy to migration enforcement, military promotions, and medical support, is descending into chaos, blame-shifting, and reversals, while only around 30% of the country still backs him.

This video argues that Trump's failures are not incidental but structural: they are the product of arch-neoliberalism combined with authoritarian instincts, a combination that now shows up in British politics too, in figures like Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe. Removing "Trump's politics" is not just an American task. It is a global one.

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

Trump got into office as the U.S. President by claiming he was the ultimate dealmaker. But Trump, the dealmaker, is becoming Trump the serial failure. What else can he get wrong is the question of the moment. Foreign policy promises are collapsing one after another. Domestic projects are also descending into chaos, and the pattern is now too consistent to ignore. What does this tell us about his politics, and what does it tell us about his government? That's what this video is all about.

Successive failures now link Trump's diplomacy and his domestic agenda. Grand claims are followed by rapid public reversals. Announcements increasingly collapse under scrutiny, and blame is shifted instead of responsibility being accepted. Only one major objective appears to be consistently delivered by Trump, and that is the objective of tax cuts for the wealthy. Nothing else is happening. Trump is failing, and everyone is beginning to notice.

For example, Trump claimed in the last week that a breakthrough deal with Iran was imminent. He said that Iran was going to agree a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: everything was in place. And then Iran, instead, hardened its negotiating position. It made a list of demands that were already known to Washington, and which it knew Washington would not agree.

Those demands were unacceptable to Trump, and as a result, the Strait of Hormuz is closed. It's going to remain closed, and everything that Trump had to say about his involvement in the deal between Iran and Oman was a load of nonsense. That deal is not going to happen, and another promised diplomatic success has simply faded away to be forgotten, like so many others.

There was another deal that failed at the same time. Donald Trump claimed that Hamas had agreed a deal to disarm in Gaza, but there was a precondition that Hamas placed on this, which was that Israel would withdraw from Gaza as a matter of priority. And of course, Israel has now rejected the proposed U.S. terms. It will not withdraw from Gaza, and there is nobody who is surprised about that. That has been their position for a long time. Another supposed Trump diplomatic triumph vanished before our eyes within minutes of it being announced. U.S. credibility is being continually weakened by these reversals, and allies and opponents are both taking notice.

There's a quieter deal, which has gone wrong as well. Trump announced the deal with Saudi Arabia on domestic nuclear energy. He was going to support Saudi Arabia in having a nuclear energy capacity. The reason why is hard to work out. Saudi Arabia is not exactly short of either sunlight for solar power or oil for any other form of power, but nonetheless, Trump was going to deliver this deal. He signed it. Saudi signed it. The trouble was, the deal failed to mention that the condition of its operation was that Saudi would recognise the existence of Israel.

Trump then added this clause back into the deal through a social media post the day after he'd signed and announced the deal with Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh reacted rather badly to the attempted revision. Confidence in the agreement was damaged. Diplomacy cannot be rewritten with a social media post. I think that for all practical purposes, another deal is dead.

That's three in a week from Trump. And just look at what is happening in his domestic agenda as well. There are failures there - almost so many, it's impossible to count. But let's use the Washington reflecting pool as an example of another pointless embarrassment, which Trump has piled onto himself. He didn't need to go anywhere near the reflecting pool in Washington. He could have left it alone. Everybody knew there were problems with it. It was covered with algae too often, but he decided to put it right, as he claimed, for a century.

He pulled in construction workers. They drained the pool. They relined it, and it's all gone disastrously wrong. Within a couple of weeks of the pool being refilled again, algae was reappearing, and then the lining began to peel from the bottom of the pool. Democrats were blamed for this. According to Trump, vandalism was going on, and people were arrested. They were threatened with 10-year prison terms, but now his own officials, appointed by Trump, have abandoned the criminal charges against the people who were arrested. It's been admitted that the construction contract that was issued has completely backfired. The work was done badly, and another self-inflicted setback has arisen for Trump. He can't even deliver a swimming pool, and that's been the basis of his business for decades.

Meanwhile, government itself is struggling. The White House building work has been halted again. Court intervention has disrupted the administration's plans once more, and controversies are continuing across other areas as well. Migration policy is still failing, and people are still being penalised totally unfairly. People are being arrested without cause. People are being expelled without due process, and ICE are still causing violence.

Military promotions meanwhile are not going as planned. Women are being blocked, as are people of colour, and that's the deliberate policy of Pete Hegseth in his role as what he calls “Secretary of War”, but actually Secretary of Defence, and meanwhile, cuts to medical support are still being planned. These have been deeply controversial and put aside once, but now they're planned for January; nobody knows how they will work there.

Everywhere, administrative competence is being questioned. Can this regime, because that's what it is - this is not a government; this is a regime, made up of Trump's hench-people - deliver anything for him, the USA or the world? That is the question that we need to ask. Has Trump actually achieved anything?

And the answer is very clear. There's only one policy that he has delivered, and that is tax cuts. Every other flagship promise seems to be failing or to be directly contradicted.

He was not going to engage in foreign wars, for example, and yet they are bogging him down.

All his domestic policy has either failed or is in the process of failing. Nothing is being delivered except that one priority of tax cuts. Everything else seems increasingly secondary.

And there is a political economy lesson in all of this. It's important that we note what is going on because political economy is about power, and so it's also about the abuse of power. And abuse of power often accompanies incompetence, and what we are seeing here is the abuse of power in action.

Business deal-making is not the same as governing.

Nations cannot be managed like private companies.

Public administration requires quite different skills to private administration, and the lesson is very clear.

Markets alone cannot solve national problems.

Trump's record now graphically illustrates those realities. He's failing because he still believes that he can run the country like one of his private fiefdoms. And that is simply not true. That underpinning logic of all of neoliberal economics is wrong, and Trump has personified that and proven the point. As a consequence, we have real politics behind this crisis.

Republicans are facing the midterm elections. The Democrats are still carrying the burden of past failures that led to Biden and Harris, and public frustration extends right across the political system. Strongman politics is still attracting a minority of Americans, but only about 30% of the country now supports Trump. For everyone else, Trump has run out of road. The U.S. political landscape is highly unstable as a result, and no one knows where it is going, including all of those around the world; we are all in trouble.

And this week, and it's important to note this, marks the anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation as President of the USA in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. Nixon fell because of lies, abuse and petty criminality. Trump's track record does, however, raise even wider questions of corruption. The damage he has caused is greater and extends beyond the United States. Nixon did at least make his a domestic scandal. Democracies must reject corruption, and that is what Trump now evidences in all his actions. And they must reject incompetence, and it is clear that his government is just that.

The real challenge then is removing the politics of Trump; removing it not just in the USA, but in all other countries where, for example, Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe in the UK do personify exactly what Trump is doing, as does much of Conservative politics.

The question is then: how do we get rid of this politics and what replaces it? That is the question that is challenging people in the USA, and the Democrats in particular as they struggle to form a new identity. It is the challenge we have here in the UK as Labour fails to rise to the challenge of providing an alternative to neoliberalism. And it is the challenge facing the Greens and the pro-independence parties in Wales and Scotland as they, too, look to build alternative narratives.

The failure of Trump is massively significant for the USA and the world, but let's not pretend it has no ramifications here; it does. What Trump is doing is failing people, and that is what politics has done around the world for too long. Neoliberal politics needs to be consigned to history. Trump is an arch neoliberal, combined with his neo-fascism, and that is the problem. We need to move on.

That's what I think. What do you think? There is, of course, a poll down below. Let us have your comments. Please do share and like this video if that's what you do. That's important to us at this moment. That helps us generate traffic, and that's hard to find on YouTube right now, as every creator will tell you. And please do subscribe to this channel and ring that bell because YouTube will then tell you when we've made a new video.

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