What did Donald Trump do today?

He promised to use his "consummate dealmaking expertise" to give China something he's already decided to give them.

Earlier this year, Congress passed a bipartisan measure requiring Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, to divest itself from Chinese government ownership or be banned in the United States. President Biden signed it into law in April, and it is scheduled to go into effect in January.

The law was intended to prevent the Chinese government from compiling extremely invasive dossiers of Americans' online behaviors, as it does with its own citizens. Nevertheless, banning an entire platform (though none of the speech that might be expressed on that platform) raises legitimate First Amendment questions, and so Bytedance has asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

Trump was entirely in favor of such a law, which was a mainstream Republican gaol, although he never got around to doing anything about it—but when it actually happened, he instantly changed his position. Today, he filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, asking them to suspend implementation of the law so that he could use his "consummate dealmaking expertise" to negotiate a different resolution.

There are two problems with this argument. First, laws passed by Congress and signed by the president don't cease to exist just because a different president wants things to work a different way.

The second is Trump's claim to "consummate dealmaking expertise." There are lots of ways to look at Trump's pre-presidential business career, although it's hard to escape the conclusion that he stole most of his wealth, either from his elderly father or taxpayers, and would have been richer if he'd simply collected interest on his inheritance rather than repeatedly drive his companies into bankruptcy. 

But the idea that he is a "dealmaker" was a public relations campaign advanced by a book, The Art of the Deal, that he didn't even write. The actual author, Tony Schwartz, has called the process of writing a book-length ad for Trump the businessman "putting lipstick on a pig" and noted that even the idea of promoting Trump as a business genius came from the publisher, not Trump himself.

Trump's brief does not make clear what "deal" he has in mind, which is a legitimate question, since his current stance is the same as that of the Chinese-controlled company he wants to "deal" with.

Why does this matter?

• A "consummate dealmaker" would probably not just give his opponent exactly what they want, although it's happened before.

• A "consummate dealmaker" probably wouldn't change their position at the drop of a hat to be the opposite of whatever his predecessor wanted, although it's happened before.