Q&A: Trump’s dealmaking “mastery”, capitalism vs democracy & do sanctions work?

**Jamie** (0:02)
This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:05)
The sleaze factor is absolutely huge. The inequality gap is horrendous right now, and a moral decline 100% demonstrated by all the incredibly rich people who are in Trump's circle, running a government mostly for their own interests.

**Jamie** (0:23)
Elon Musk spent an enormous amount of money helping Donald Trump be elected president.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:29)
Elon Musk clearly said that Trump wouldn't have won without him. Glad we've cleared that up, Jamie.

**Jamie** (0:35)
Glad we fixed American politics with those five questions.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:42)
Hi everyone. It's Christiane and Jamie back with the Q&A episode of The Ex Files. I'm in Paris this week, and Jamie, where are you?

**Jamie** (0:51)
I'm in New York.

**Christiane Amanpour** (0:53)
Okay, so I'm going to ask you the first question. It's from Andy on Instagram.
For all his talk about the art of the deal, is Donald Trump actually one of the worst negotiators ever? He's been saying the US and Iran are close or very good and very good deal for two months, but I'm not buying it. What's going on? Andy, I am with you because as a person who has her own show and has to talk about this every single day on CNN, it's become Groundhog Day. So I don't think he's a great negotiator and I don't think he knows how to get himself out of this because I think there are too many people in his ear telling him, oh no, that's a bad deal. Oh no, this, that and the other. Jamie, what do you think?

**Jamie** (1:31)
Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head. There's too many people who keep telling him it's a bad deal because there are what I call the remaining neocons who really do want to end the Iranian regime and somehow have them capitulate and somehow have persuaded Trump that the use of military power can cause them to capitulate when in fact this particular war has not yielded that result because the Iranians have gotten some leverage out of it. Nobody expected in the Trump administration. The rest of us expected it. We all understood that it was possible for them to close the Straits of Hormuz and cause pain.
So no, he's not the greatest negotiator in the world.
There are some things that have happened under Trump that are useful. For example, when he finally told Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop the war in Gaza, he sort of did for a while and slowed it down. He does have the ability to bring countries together in Africa, who very much want the support of the United States and can advance the peace process in those cases. I think he could, if he chose, probably have a real impact on Vladimir Putin. But he hasn't chosen to do that. So, so far, the evidence is that there's no real seriousness to these negotiations on Iran. If the current reports are accurate, we're actually going to delay the nuclear issue down the road. Now, when saying that and pointing that out, it's worth pointing out that that comes after the destruction of much of those facilities by military action. So there is a window we have where they are destroyed. It would be very hard for them to be taken advantage of, and we can perhaps get a better deal. And so that destruction makes the situation somewhat safer than it was before, but not as known and understood as well as when we had the agreement in place under the Obama administration.

**Christiane Amanpour** (3:31)
Yeah, and Trump just keeps talking about the Obama accord that he pulled out of, which is why we're here today with this completely crazy situation. And he keeps, in his mind's eye, he keeps trying to make something bigger and better than what Obama did. So I don't know whether that's possible, certainly not at this moment anyway. But just to note, there's an organization, sort of a press organization called Israel Hayyam. And they had a very interesting report on this issue this week, in which a secret branch of the Mossad was revealed. And it basically said that, you know, we're still at it, we are still going to be trying our influence campaign, and we are still going to try to topple this regime one way or the other and get the people of Iran to topple this regime. And it's quite detailed, I'd encourage people to go and read it. It's quite interesting. One other thing, the latest on the Iranian kilograms of highly enriched uranium suggested that a country like Kazakhstan might be willing to take it.