He wanted his aides to tell diplomats, “I’m sorry … he is out of control … you don’t know the man,” or that he’s a “dramatically disjointed personality … capable of barbaric cruelty … more than a little paranoid.”
“He” is not the person who last week manhandled the leader of Colombia into taking migrants who were in the United States illegally — the president who in recent days is flexing his tariff muscles with Canada and Mexico, giving them non-negotiable demands they regard as unreasonable and making it clear there are no limits to what he will do to get his way.
Instead, it was Richard Nixon who gave a name to this type of extreme pressure accompanied by ultimatums — the very technique Donald Trump used with Colombia and now is applying to the United States’ North American neighbors.
“They’ll believe any threat that Nixon makes because he’s Nixon,” the future 37th president told H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, later his White House chief of staff, during the 1968 presidential campaign. “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
This is precisely the playbook — the Madman Theory — that led Donald Trump to threaten Colombia with a 25% tariff, which, within a week, would escalate to 50% if it didn’t accede to his wishes. President Gustavo Petro resisted for about a nanosecond — he spoke fecklessly of national sovereignty and human rights, concepts of no import to the American president — and then he did what Trump knew he’d do: He capitulated. Later, Trump re-shared an X post that said, “I think Trump’s greatest superpower might be his absolutely insane ability to make everyone he has a fight with lose their mind. The Colombian president was just the latest person to fall victim to that, but he wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.”
This has been part of the Trump portfolio since his days as a real estate and casino mogul. Writing in International Security Studies Forum two months into the first Trump administration, Todd S. Sechser, of the University of Virginia, and Matthew Fuhrmann, of Texas A&M University, noted that the Trump business negotiating style “kept adversaries off-balance and nervous about what he might do next.”
Trump didn’t invent this approach. Nor did Nixon. As long ago as 1517, Niccolo Machiavelli said that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness.”
In 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles delivered a warning that if Beijing didn’t work to speed a Korean War armistice, President Dwight Eisenhower “would probably make stronger … military exertions and that this might well extend the conflict,” and if the fighting intensified, “it is difficult to know what [the] end might be” — a lesson in statesmanship as gamesmanship that Nixon, then Eisenhower’s vice president, absorbed.
Daniel Ellsberg, later a Nixon antagonist for leaking the Pentagon Papers, delivered a lecture called “The Political Uses of Madness” at the Lowell Institute of the Boston Public Library in 1959 that argued, “The first method is simply to be unpredictable; to seem ‘a little’ erratic, impulsive, unstable. The object: to make the opponent believe that, after all, this blackmailer is at least likely to do anything.”
When trade representative Robert Lighthizer told Trump in his first term he could convey to South Korea that it had 30 days to grant concessions to the United States, the president said, “No, no, no. That’s not how you negotiate. You don’t tell them they’ve got 30 days. You tell them, ‘This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute’ … You tell them if they don’t give the concessions now, this crazy guy will pull out of the deal.”
This technique was on vivid display with Trump’s pressure on Colombia, which by some measures is the United States’ closest ally in Latin America and our third-largest trade partner in the region, in part a result of the mining, manufacturing, finance and insurance trade that was spurred by an economic agreement signed more than 18 years ago.
None of that mattered when President Petro resisted the American effort to deport migrants to Colombia. If anything, Trump doubled down on his determination.
“These measures are just the beginning,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!”
That was classic Trump. “Sometimes people threaten unilateral actions to influence what another actor is going to do,” said Laurence Ales, an economist at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “Threats like the ones Trump made can have the effect of shaping final outcomes.
However, in an article in the journal Foreign Policy published in recent weeks, Daniel Drezner, a scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, expressed skepticism of the long-term effectiveness of Trump’s Madman gambits.
“There are many reasons to doubt that Trump will be able to effectively play the madman in his second term,” he wrote. “The most obvious is that Trump’s first-term efforts at coercive bargaining went largely for naught. His administration’s track record on economic coercion was less than stellar. Trump’s greatest foreign-policy success — the Abraham Accords — was due to proffering inducements rather than crazily threatening sticks.”
But Trump’s negotiating strategy is much like that of Nixon, who wrote in a 1969 memorandum to national security adviser Henry Kissinger about warning the Soviet Union to move Vietnam War negotiations to a conclusion: “We must worry the Soviets about the possibility that we are losing our patience and may get out of control.”
That’s Trump’s favored tactic. “He’s in the position where he can pressure leaders of other countries,” said Vivek Astvansh of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. “We saw it with Colombia, and we’re seeing it with Canada and Mexico. It comes down to this: He is the president of the United States, and he has the power.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
