After 47 months, we are almost at the end of our long national nightmare.  And for his closing acts, Donald Trump is going out the same way that he came in.

Anybody who followed  Trump the businessman should not have been surprised at Trump the president.  For all of his propaganda about being a great deal maker, the reality was something else.  There were three key lessons from Trump the businessman which have been true for this entire administration.

First, Trump was only ever concerned about what was it in it for him.  Trump was never the type of businessman who big on win-win deals in which both sides gained from the deal.  Instead, he wanted to get the most possible out of a deal even if it meant screwing over the other side.

Second, Trump rarely did the dirty work of negotiating himself.  Instead, he delegated to his underlings to do the negotiating and only came in at the end to bless (or veto) the final deal.

Third, Trump’s word is worthless.  Deals are made to be broken.  If he, at any point in time, thinks that the deal that he made is no good, he will kill the deal.

And we have seen all of these play out over the past several months.  In his battle to steal the election, he has been repeatedly disappointed by people whom he helped in the past — judges who he appointed, governors and secretaries of state that he endorsed.  In his mind, he did them a personal favor, and so they owed him a personal favor of his choice even if what he wanted was something that they could not legally do.

And we have seen this throughout his administration in his pardons and commutations.  Over the past four years, he has handed out a very low number of pardons and commutations.  While he has given some token pardons to your typical recipients — people who have served a substantial portion of a lengthy sentence that now seems unfair or people who have done well since completing their sentence — the vast majority has either been political allies (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, etc.) or conservative causes (the Blackwell contractors who killed civilians in Iraq).  We can only expect more of these personal pardons in the last four weeks.  And while there are always some personal pardons in any administration, the Trump record seems to be that personal pardons are the norm and the ordinary pardons are the exception.

And we are seeing it in the negotiations over the continuing appropriations bill and the COVID relief bill which have now been merged together.  Trump, as has been the norm for the past four years, has delegated much of the negotiations over this bill to Treasury Secretary Mnuchin.  There was no indication during the negotiations that there were “must haves” from Trump’s position that would be deal killers.  Now that Mnuchin has reached a deal on Trump’s behalf, Trump appears to now have some non-negotiable demands.

Admittedly, there are things in these bills that are questionable.  The nature of the appropriations process often gets us to this position.  The bills are never concluded prior to the start of the fiscal year on October 1.  Congress has to pass short continuing appropriations bills until they can wrap everything up, and the desire to finish causes all of the remaining bills to be thrown together into one exceedingly long bill.  With a bill of this length, all of the key players can put in a nice provision or two that benefits key interest groups in their district or state.

But everybody had to give up things that they wanted to reach this point.  And walking away from it just means that negotiations will have to start over from scratch.  While Democrats might agree with some of the provisions that Trump now wants, Senator McConnell is going to want concessions on other issues to sell to the Senate Republicans.  One essential part of politics is that a deal is a deal.  When Nancy Pelosi makes a concession on behalf of Democrats to get Republicans to agree to other provisions, the Republicans count on her ability to bring the Democratic caucus behind the compromise.  While, occasionally, the terms of the deal are unable to be sold to one caucus or the other, negotiations depend on the ability of both sides to deliver on their promises.    And Trump throughout this presidency has been like Lucy with the football.  Just when it seemed like a deal had been reached on a major issue, Trump would change his mind and add new terms that were non-negotiable.  At some point, even if the failure to reach a deal is going to have negative consequences, you have given up as much as you can and have to lay the blame for failed negotiations on the lack of good faith on the other side.  And Trump does not know the meaning of negotiating in good faith.

Finally, something that we will probably talk about more next week, these decisions have impacts.  In thinking only about himself, Trump puts his would-be allies into a difficult position.  In two weeks, the folks in Georgia will be voting.  There are several military bases in Georgia that depend on defense spending.  By vetoing the National Defense Authorization Act, Trump puts the two Georgia Senators in a position where any vote that they cast will annoy some Republican voters.  Either they vote against defense spending in a pro-defense spending state or they are disloyal to Trump when they need ever Trump voter to come out and vote (notwithstanding all the fictional stories about problems with Georgia’s election system) for them.  Trump is not going to get what he wants in this bill.  He is not going to get a change to the law governing social media websites.  (While there are some arguments for changing and modernizing the rules on what such websites can do as far as allowing or not allowing slanderous and false posts, that is a complex issue which is not appropriate for a defense authorization bill.)  He is not going to get to keep the names of traitors on U.S. military bases.

In short, this is ending the way that it began.  Trump was corrupt from the beginning, and he has tried to run the government as if it were a privately owned corporation.  He didn’t come to Washington to clean up the swamp.  He came to take advantage of the most swampy elements of Washington.

It will soon be at an end, but we are going to have quite a mess to clean up.  And there are still four weeks left for Trump to leave even more carnage behind.