Hard‐Core Toughie: Donald Trump’s Negotiations for the United States Presidency

Back in 2013, Business Insider put Donald Trump’s chances of winning the United States presidency at 150 to one (Walker and Gould 2015). When he officially announced his bid for the White House in June 2015, his odds were still at fifty‐three to one. But despite these odds, he was able to defeat sixteen other Republican candidates in the primary and, ultimately, one seasoned, well‐funded candidate in the general election. How did he do it?

Trump’s victories can be viewed through the prism of negotiation theory and practice. Indeed, all the candidates were engaged in “an interpersonal decision‐making process that individuals undertake when they cannot achieve their objectives single‐handedly” (Thompson 2015). In the case of Donald Trump, he was negotiating with many parties, including the other candidates, the Republican Party, the press corps, and the American electorate, whose votes he needed.

In this article, we examine the tactics that Donald Trump employed in negotiating with these four major stakeholders in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We gathered the data for this analysis from multiple sources including interviews, debates, articles, and books, especially Trump’s bestselling book, Trump: The Art of the Deal (Trump 1987), and have interpreted that data according to established theories of negotiation and persuasion. We begin with a brief overview of Trump’s personality and philosophy as a basis for understanding his general negotiating approach and then analyze how his presidential campaign embodied that approach.

To understand Donald Trump’s negotiating approach one must begin by examining his personality, philosophy, and ethics, which inform his strategies and tactics.¹Multiple accounts, including those of his associates, adversaries, and third‐party observers (e.g., journalists) report that Trump is extremely competitive and places a high value on winning (Sherman 2015; McAdams 2016). In fact, evidence suggests that he is more than simply competitive; rather, his behavior falls into the category of “hypercompetitive.” John Houston and his colleagues (2015: 108) describe hypercompetitiveness as “a dysfunctional form of extreme competitiveness linked to neurosis and representing an indiscriminate need to win at all costs. In contrast to ‘normal’ competitiveness, hypercompetitiveness is associated with heightened self‐worth fluctuating with underlying low self‐esteem, high levels of neuroticism, decreased need for others, and interest in admiration and recognition from others.” In Donald Trump’s own words, “My whole life is about winning. I always win” (Trump 2015).

A number of psychologists and other analysts have suggested that Donald Trump might have a narcissistic personality (i.e., a sense of grandiosity – brilliance, power, success – and desire for attention and admiration) (Lipman 2016; McAdams 2016; Nutt 2016). Additional studies that explored the public personas of both Trump and his Democratic rival for the presidency, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seem to corroborate this observation. In one account, Beth Visser, Angela Book, and Anthony Volk (2017) asked ten personality psychologists (seven described their political orientation as left and three as center) who frequently read and/or watched news about the U.S. election, to rate the two political opponents on six personality factors (i.e., honesty‐humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience). The psychologists viewed Donald Trump as low on honesty‐humility, agreeableness, emotionality and conscientiousness – ranking low on these characteristics is associated with “dark” personalities (i.e., personalities characterized as narcissistic, psychopathic, and Machiavellian). Alessandro Nai and Jürgen Maier (2018) replicated these findings surveying a pool of national and international experts on U.S. politics. Although surveys have shown that many U.S. voters also rate Trump as having low levels of honesty and agreeableness, their assessments do typically differ depending on their political preferences (Wright and Tomlinson 2018).

In the Visser, Book, and Volk (2017) study, participants also rated Trump high on social self‐esteem, which correlates to confidence, charisma, and sociability. This supports the findings of Ethlyn Williams and her colleagues (2018), who found that, within the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Trump’s attributed charisma alleviated the negative effects of attributed narcissistic leadership on voter choice. If this is the case and Trump has a narcissistic personality, winning could be his way of enhancing his charisma rather than his ultimate personal and professional objective. Nonetheless, competitiveness is a behavioral characteristic central to Trump’s personality or public persona.

One of the risks of a highly competitive attitude is a disregard for customs or ethics that might inhibit one’s chances of winning (Mudrack, Bloodgood, and Turnley 2012). Trump’s truthfulness and ethics were challenged throughout the presidential campaign, including charges that he cheats at golf (Terris 2016), did not actually write his book Trump: The Art of the Deal (Mayer 2016), misrepresented the Better Business Bureau rating of his university (Greenberg 2016), or lied about his past sexual relations with women (Tolentino 2016).

Trump displayed both competitiveness and ethical elasticity at his first White House meeting with congressional leaders as president (Shear and Huetteman 2017). Despite the lack of evidence of any significant fraud in the election, he continued to claim that illegal immigrants had cast millions of votes, which cost him a victory in the popular vote – winning the election apparently was insufficient. His comment at the same meeting about the “huge crowd” at his inauguration, a crowd that he claimed was unmatched in recent history, also suggests a need to win in all arenas at all times, even if it means creating “alternative facts.”

The Trump personality traits that we have described so far typically favor a distributive (win‐lose) approach to negotiating rather than an integrative (win‐win) approach. According to the most extreme version of the distributive approach, negotiating is a zero‐sum game and negotiators should seek to maximize their individual gains. The integrative approach, on the other hand, emphasizes maintaining relationships by maximizing parties’ joint outcomes (Lax and Sebenius 1986; L. Thompson 2015). Certainly the act of running for president of the United States, on some level, is distributive, because all the candidates have the same goal and only one person can achieve it. Compared to Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan (“Stronger Together”), however, which connotes a more collaborative win‐win approach, Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” not to mention his inaugural promise of “America first,” suggests a distributive approach in the context of world geopolitics.

Given Trump’s extreme competitiveness and moral elasticity, it might be argued that he falls into a special category of distributive negotiators: “hard‐core toughies” (Volkema 1999). The outward appearance of some negotiators suggests toughness, when in reality they are “faux toughies” (e.g., intent on preserving their tough public images, but amenable to reason and compromise when addressed in private). Other individuals may become tough only when they are uniquely provoked (i.e., a sacred line is crossed). But hard‐core toughies are intent on winning, often in any and every environment, and frequently at any cost. Their friendly demeanor is often a ruse, designed to get a counterpart to lower his/her guard. And they are full of surprises, often unpleasant ones for other parties (delivering defective products, failing to honor warranties, reneging on partnerships, etc.).

The press has sometimes referred to Trump as a bully, and some authors have suggested he should be dealt with as such (Deace 2016). (The Merriam‐Webster Dictionary defines a bully as “someone who frightens, hurts, or threatens smaller or weaker people.”) Bullies, however, often appear unprovoked in their aggressiveness, while Trump’s behavior is more typically in response to another party’s actions. Further, he will sometimes take on bigger and stronger people (e.g., his efforts to discredit President Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship). Therefore, we think he is more accurately classified as a hard‐core toughie. His frequent threats to sue his opponents (e.g., the women who accused him of sexual improprieties and The New York Times for reporting it), not to mention the more than four thousand actual lawsuits he has been involved in over his career, including seventy‐five active lawsuits as of this writing (Zarroli 2016), are consistent with this attitude and approach.

From this underlying orientation and negotiating approach, a number of competitive tactics naturally flow. In theory, all these tactics could be used with the various counterparts that Donald Trump faced during the campaign – the other candidates (in the primary and general elections), the Republican Party, the press corps, and the electorate. Some tactics, however, were used more frequently and naturally with one or two of these groups than with the others. Table 1 lists each tactic.

Candidates in a primary election typically confront the challenge of differentiating themselves from the other candidates. Trump chose one tactic, in particular, to accomplish this: high‐balling. Most negotiators are perhaps more familiar with the low‐ball tactic, which is common in buyer‐seller exchanges. For example, a buyer enters a car dealership, says that he has just begun his search, and identifies a car of interest. As the buyer is about to leave, the sales representative suggests that she might be able to get the car for him for under $15,000 and gives the buyer her business card. Being new to the market, the buyer decides to shop around, only to discover that no one will sell him a car like this for anywhere near $15,000. So he goes back to the first dealership. However, the sales rep now makes excuses as to why she can’t get that price either. Exhausted, the buyer decides to take the car at a higher price. The buyer has been low‐balled.

Trump employed a high‐ball tactic with the electorate, particularly during the Republican primary. To differentiate himself from the other candidates, he made promises that he could not deliver, for example, to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico that Mexico would pay for and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. In so doing, he captured the imagination of much of the electorate while setting himself apart from the other Republican contenders. Coincidently, this tactic corresponds to the first step in the eleven‐step formula for business success offered in his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal: “Think big” (Trump 1987).²

The “good guy‐bad guy” tactic (also called “good cop‐bad cop”) requires that a team of two negotiators represent one party. In a buyer‐seller negotiation, for example, a friendly negotiator, the “good guy,” engages the seller while his or her partner, the “bad guy,” finds multiple faults with the seller’s product and identifies them, directly or indirectly, to the seller. The good guy seeks to assure the seller that the bad guy can be brought around if the seller would make a few concessions. The buying team undertakes an orchestrated effort to get a better deal from the seller.

During the presidential campaign, Trump employed a one‐person good guy‐bad guy tactic, playing both parts himself. For example, he used pejorative language against rivals and critics initially and then praised them and treated them as friends if they appeased his desires. Early in the primary campaign, Trump showed no particular animosity toward Republican candidate Ben Carson, until Carson’s outsider status – which Trump also claimed – and fundraising helped him surge in the October 2015 polls. Weeks later Trump released a video calling Carson a liar and likening his temper to an incurable “pathological disease” (Friedersdorf 2015). But Carson dropped out of the race and endorsed him, and Trump eventually selected him to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).³

Trump’s relationship with Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, followed a similar pattern. Ryan became critical of Trump’s positions on several occasions (particularly racial issues) and declared in a May 2016 CNN interview that he was “not there right now” when it came to endorsing Trump for president (Bradner 2016). In August, Trump returned the favor, saying he was not ready to endorse Ryan for re‐election and even praising Ryan’s opponent in the Republican primary (Rucker 2016). He ultimately endorsed Ryan, however, three days later. In October, Ryan disinvited Trump from a campaign rally, to which Trump retaliated by calling Ryan a “weak and ineffective leader” (Stracqualursi 2016).

The extent to which Donald Trump is willing to play the bad‐guy role is reflected in another tactic he employs from time to time – escalation. Most negotiators would prefer their counterparts to engage on their terms. Individuals who choose an integrative approach to negotiating, for example, would be most comfortable with counterparts who favor the same approach. On the other hand, when individuals are met with more aggressive behavior (an extreme offer or demand, factual misrepresentations, etc.), it is not uncommon for them to match or exceed such behavior to send a message and get their counterpart to back off (Fleck, Volkema, and Pereira 2016). Hard‐core toughies, however, sometimes don’t back off; instead, they further escalate their hard‐core toughie behavior.

Trump chose to change the discourse of elective politics in the United States. He employed pejorative labels to describe each of the other candidates who threatened his bid for election (e.g., “Liddle Marco” to describe Florida Senator Marco Rubio, “Lyin’ Ted” to describe Texas Senator Ted Cruz, “Low‐energy Jeb” for former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and “Crooked Hillary” to describe Clinton). And he frequently escalated his behavior by threatening legal action, including to have Hillary Clinton jailed if he was elected. In so doing, Trump forced his counterparts to match his style or risk appearing weakened and vulnerable – at least as long as the majority of Republican primary voters did not object to his approach. Eventually some of the Republican primary candidates did reciprocate (e.g., Rubio’s comments about Trump’s small hands, Jaffe 2016), but it did not necessarily fit their personas to fight fire with fire, at least with someone as aggressive and hypercompetitive as Trump. He forced them to engage on his terms with escalating rhetoric and then, in many cases, to back down.

Trump’s willingness to increase the stakes in a negotiation (i.e., escalate hard‐core tactics) is consistent with another piece of advice offered in his book Trump: The Art of the Deal: “Fight back” (step 8) (Trump 1987). In the process of “fighting back” (escalation) during the campaign, Trump reinforced his image of authenticity while discrediting political opponents who chose to do the same, who were not as effective at employing this technique as he was.

One tactic that negotiators sometimes employ is to claim that their counterparts are treating them unfairly, which, while it may upset some counterparts (Rackham 2003), can destabilize others and cause them to doubt their own positions (e.g., demands, offers). We think we know what is “fair” for us, but what is “fair” for the other party? In essence, a call for fairness can cause a counterpart to begin negotiating with him or herself.

On multiple occasions Donald Trump alleged that the media was not covering the candidates fairly. For example, prior to his first debate with Clinton, Trump suggested that moderator Lester Holt might be a Democrat and claimed future moderator Anderson Cooper treats him “very unfairly at CNN” (Jackson 2016). He sought to get the media to question its own practices and then defensively reduce or restrict its criticism of him.

Negotiators will sometimes test the other party’s resolve by threatening to leave the negotiation. The “walkout,” whether it occurs in a retail setting (e.g., walking out of a car dealership) or a labor–management negotiation, often reveals who has leverage (i.e., who needs the deal less because she or he has better alternatives). Indeed, in Trump: The Art of the Deal, Trump advises to “use your leverage” (Step 5) (Trump 1987; see also Shell in this issue and Kogan in this issue).

Throughout the campaign, Trump was the recipient of an enormous amount of free press (Confessore and Yourish 2016). This was because, in dollars‐and‐cents terms, he was newsworthy: the general public, which was perhaps most familiar with him from his television show The Apprentice, was eager to learn what he did and said. And because of his newsworthiness, the media outlets that followed his campaign closely saw increased viewership and readership and increased revenue as well (Mahler 2017), although how much of that is precisely due to coverage of Trump is impossible to ascertain.

During the primary campaign, Trump employed his leverage with the press with a walkout by missing the seventh Republican primary debate to protest what he claimed was unfair treatment at the hands of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who was scheduled to moderate the debate. (His daughter Ivanka subsequently walked out of a Cosmopolitan magazine interview in protest over tough questions.)

Negotiators can also gain leverage when they negotiate on their “home turf” (Karrass 1996). When a counterpart travels to meet a negotiator, it suggests that the negotiator has a power advantage. Upon arrival, the counterpart becomes subject to the negotiator’s schedule (and wait times). The meeting environment itself (e.g., business office) may suggest wealth, success, and social connections, which further underscore the power imbalance, and, the home‐turf negotiator can more easily control the seating, who attends, the agenda, and the availability of support functions (Shell 2006; Volkema 2006).

Trump seized a home turf advantage when he held his own event, separate from the televised seventh Republican primary debate. He was not only able to control the environment of that event, but also, by using his own airplane and hotels for meetings throughout the campaign, he was able to exercise substantial leverage. His April on‐the‐air meeting with Megyn Kelly to “clear the air,” for example, was held at Trump Tower in New York, not at a Fox studio (Stelter 2016). It was followed by meetings there with the National Hispanic Advisory Council, the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) Republican Leadership Initiative, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Del Real and Gearan 2016). Later, as president‐elect, he met with former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who had criticized him heavily during the campaign, at one of his hotel restaurants (Acosta and Diaz 2016). Both Romney and the press apparently believed that Trump was considering him as candidate for Secretary of State.

In his seminal work on influence, Robert Cialdini (2009) identified six principles of persuasion; Donald Trump employed several of these principles to influence voters. One is likeability: according to Cialdini, people tend to follow an individual they know and like. They are more inclined to like someone who is physically attractive, similar to themselves, or who gives them compliments.

Certainly the electorate knew Donald Trump. He had been in the public eye for decades, and his popular television show, The Apprentice, had been on the air, including syndication, since 2004. He adorns himself with attractive women, a point he sought to drive home when he unfavorably compared the appearance of the wives of some of the other Republican primary candidates (i.e. Cruz’s wife) to his wife Melania, a former model (Green 2016).

Although as a celebrity millionaire (or billionaire) from Manhattan, Trump is notably dissimilar to his typical voter, he effectively differentiated himself from the other Republican candidates in ways that enabled voters to connect with him. Eschewing a teleprompter for the most part, he chose to speak in the vernacular and issued a myriad of controversial and “politically incorrect” statements. To many voters, this off‐the‐cuff, informal quality apparently made him seem more genuine and relatable. A popular opinion among Trump’s voters was that “he may say controversial things, but at least he tells you what he thinks” or that “Trump is exactly what you get, with Hillary [Clinton] you can’t know what’s real” (Fishwick 2016). As Democratic candidate Senator Bernie Sanders aptly put it, “people think Trump says exactly what he thinks and is not passing it through a filter. There is a fundamental yearning for authenticity that is probably felt more broadly” (Tumulty and Johnson 2016).

In addition, when Trump plays the good guy, he practices extreme flattery. His favorite adjectives to describe his friends include “amazing,” “classy,” “fantastic,” “great,” “terrific,” and “tremendous” (Fuller and Landsbaum 2015). Everyone (staff, campaign workers, supporters, etc.) likes to be told they are amazing, fantastic, and terrific, and voters like to hear that about their cities and states as well.

According to the principle of social proof (Cialdini 2009), people look to their peers for guidance in their decision making, particularly when they are uncertain about a course of action, such as how to vote. Large political rallies provide voters with a form of social proof: to the extent that individuals at these events are viewed as peers, their behavior can influence the decision making of voters who identify with them in some way and who are “on the fence” with respect to their votes. Throughout the campaign Trump often played to much larger crowds than did his competitors, including Clinton, although not always as big as he claimed (Sullivan and Johnson 2016). In September 2016, Trump held twice as many rallies as Clinton (Meckler and Nelson 2016), which were televised in whole or part. And while Clinton was more popular among women voters than Trump, women were not only seen at Trump events but offered impassioned media interviews in support of him.

Another principle of successful persuasion is the use of scarcity (Cialdini 2009), which typically involves convincing prospective buyers that they should act quickly because supply is limited. Implicit in this message is the notion that a product or service is both sought after and rare (i.e., can’t be found elsewhere) and could soon be gone. Many infomercials on television contain a call‐to‐action based on the scarcity principle (e.g., “Act now, while supplies last!”).

According to Trump, the leadership that could address the United States’ many problems (immigration, jobs, trade policy, and so forth) was scarce. Breaking with two centuries of political tradition, he didn’t ask Americans to place their trust in each other (as Clinton did with her slogan, “Stronger Together”) or in God, but rather in him alone (Applebaum 2016). As he declared at the Republican Convention, “I alone can fix it.” Because he claimed to be a self‐funded candidate, he argued that only he would be unbeholden to special interests. Defining himself as the sole solution to America’s problems was a negotiation tactic that Trump employed with the electorate, a means of differentiating himself from other candidates.

Finally, the authority principle suggests that people respect and seek to follow authority figures. In a presidential election, candidates often prove they have enough authority by earning endorsements from current or former government officials, the press, organizations, and other experts. According to this principle, people are impressed by titles (doctor, general, CEO), visible wealth (expensive dress, automobiles, homes), and anything that suggests success. Trump initially lacked standard political legitimacy because of his political and public service inexperience, but he argued that his business success, and particularly his success as a negotiator, gave him the appropriate expertise to lead the United States. He used his name, which decorates buildings worldwide, and his apparent wealth, celebrity, and expensive lifestyle to reinforce this idea. If he’s that rich, he suggested, he must know what he is doing. As many of his voters put it, “he knows how to make deals, deals that will make America prosperous again” (Fishwick 2016).

The tactics that Trump used in the presidential campaign both reflect his existing negotiation style as well as his chosen campaign strategy. Trump considered running for president as far back as 1988, engaged an exploratory committee to seek a third‐party nomination in 1999, and spoke openly about his interest in the Republican Party’s nomination in 2012 (D’Antonio 2016). During this time, his policy views changed considerably, as did his party affiliations: Republican (1987), Reform (1999), Democratic (2001), Republican (2009), Independent (2011), and Republican (2012) (McAdams 2016). Interestingly, he almost always aligned himself with the party that did not occupy the White House at the time.

In the preceding (2012) campaign, Trump ranked second among Republican challengers with 17 percent of the vote in an early straw poll (taken in April 2011) (Walter and Falcone 2011). He never officially entered the 2012 campaign, however, and announced in May 2011 that he would not seek the Republican nomination (claiming nevertheless that he would have won if he had chosen to continue) (MacAskill 2011). His signature issue was to challenge Obama’s legitimacy as president by claiming he had not been born in the United States (also known as the “birther” controversy).

Did Trump learn some things about what would work and not work in a presidential campaign through these endeavors? Did his negotiating strategy change as a consequence? His 2012 foray has much in common with his fully developed 2016 effort. As noted above, he demonstrated a great deal of consistency in his approach (distributive/hard‐core toughie) throughout his 2016 run for the presidency. He typically stood by his claims even when they were largely disproven, for example, that he had opposed the Iraq war (Carroll and Greenberg 2016); that Barack Obama had founded the Islamic state (Lederman 2016); that Captain Kahn, the soldier whose parents spoke at the Democratic convention, would be alive if he had been president (Rossoll 2016); and even escalated his tactics (e.g., moving from denial to accusations to threats of legal action regarding the sexual assault allegations) (Tolentino 2016).

Although primary election strategy is generally viewed as different from the strategy for winning a general election in which the candidate has to attract votes from a broader base, we find little or no evidence that Trump altered his distributive/hard‐core toughie approach. Indeed, while some were saying “Let Trump be Trump” (Reagan 2016), there was perhaps a larger number of advisors and pundits who argued that Donald Trump needed to “pivot” (Jacobs 2016). He did not.

He did, however, vary which distributive/hard‐core toughie tactics he used with each counterpart – other candidates, the Republican Party, the press, and the electorate (Table One). For example, he employed the high‐balling tactic with the electorate, mainly in the Republican primary, to differentiate himself from a large field of candidates. He employed the fairness tactic primarily against the press corps, choosing not to participate in one of the primary debates (the walkout tactic) because of the alleged unfairness of one of the moderators. Other U.S. politicians have previously alleged unfair treatment in the press, allegations that can make the press more sensitive to criticism and perhaps more inclined to second‐guess their own intentions, but none have done so as relentlessly as Trump (T. Thompson 2011; Rutenberg 2016).

Trump’s distributive/hard‐core toughie negotiating approach seems to have, for the most part, remained consistent over the years. In 2016, he was able to match that style to the frustrations of the voters who constituted his “base” (immigration, manufacturing job losses, and the opioid crisis, among others) and his tactics varied depending on his negotiating counterpart.

In this article, we have examined the ways in which Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign reflected his tactics as a negotiator. During the primary and general elections, Trump competed with sixteen other candidates, and interacted with the Republican Party, the press corps, and the U.S. electorate. These interactions functioned very much like a series of negotiations. How did he handle these negotiations in terms of overall approach/strategy and specific tactics?

Both in his professional career and during his campaigns for president, Trump has shown considerable consistency in his negotiating approach. His strong desire to win and his ethical flexibility underpin a distributive (win‐lose) hard‐core toughie negotiating approach, from which a number of competitive tactics and principles of persuasion naturally follow. Within this approach, however, Trump employed different tactics with different negotiating counterparts (e.g., the high‐ball tactic and scarcity principle with the U.S. electorate, the one‐person good guy‐bad guy tactic with Republican presidential candidates, the fairness and withdrawal tactics with the press).

We hope that this case analysis will provide valuable insights to those analysts who seek to examine Trump’s negotiating behavior during his presidency, such as those included elsewhere in this issue of Negotiation Journal. Has he applied the distributive approach that won him the office to his role as president? And, if so, how effectively?

Whether his preferred competitive tactics will be effective in the long term, particularly when negotiating with other world leaders, remains to be seen. Negotiators are often advised to avoid negotiating with hard‐core toughies but, when this is not possible, to negotiate the conditions of engagement (i.e., acceptable and unacceptable language, physicality, process). But because of the military dominance and economic importance of the United States and the powers of the U.S. presidency, it is proving difficult for world leaders to avoid Donald Trump. And as some Democrats found during the election, the act of simply declaring, as First Lady Michelle Obama did, “When they go low, we go high” (Brabold 2016) might be insufficient.

This article described several negotiating tactics and principles of persuasion employed by Donald Trump during the 2016 primary and general presidential election. However common these tactics may have been in business settings, Trump was the first to introduce them so extensively to the central political stage and use them in a way that seemed congruent with his public persona. His success suggests that merely condemning the use of such means to achieve specific political ends may be an insufficient strategy and that Trump’s political opponents would be well advised to countermeasure them. Future case analyses may find it useful to examine how Congress, Democratic politicians, and other world leaders responded to these tactics and the results of their efforts. Such analyses could suggest novel and practical ways to deal with hard‐core toughies.