Moments before a three-point shooting contest at an NBA All-Star Game, basketball legend Larry Bird warned his fellow contestants that they might as well skip warmups because he was going to win the event anyway.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the eve of a Mr. Olympia body-building competition, casually mentioned to Lou Ferrigno, a highly touted up-and-comer, that, golly, he himself had already won that particular championship five whole times.
In a maneuver vastly less subtle than either of those, Los Angeles Raiders defensive end Howie Long once yelled across the line at a Chicago Bears blocking guard, “I’m gonna follow you to the parking lot and beat you up in front of your family.”
That’s pretty much the same negotiating tactic that President Donald Trump recently attempted to pull off in threatening to levy tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China. He talked trash. He practiced the art of the psych-out.
Except it appears so far largely to have backfired.
Yes, like athletes, executives occasionally talk trash, too. They engage in Machiavellian bullying, all bluster and bluff, whether in sales pitches, job interviews, board meetings, business lunches, or chance encounters in the bathroom, to lobby for everything from raises and promotions to bigger budgets, lower leases, new clients, a higher profile, and a corner office.
For Donald Trump, talking trash is by now a signature lifelong modus operandi. He talked trash as a snotty kid in prep school, he talked trash as a real estate developer and casino owner, he talked trash as the make-believe big boss hosting the TV show The Apprentice, he talked name-calling trash against all of his opponents, Republican and Democrat alike, as a presidential candidate, and now, true to form, he’s once again talking trash as commander-in-chief.
As I long ago discovered both in my corporate career with global consulting firms and on the schoolyard basketball courts of New York City, the best psych-out artists know how to mess with your mind. They provoke your fear of failure, trick you into ad nauseum second-guessing of yourself, and manipulate you into panic bordering on paralysis. They attempt to belittle, unnerve, taunt, intimidate, and otherwise sabotage an adversary—whatever it takes to humiliate foes into submission and gain a competitive advantage.
The psych-out is, of course, an old-school Darwinian ploy. In Greek mythology, the heroic warrior Achilles swaggered before the gates of Troy accusing Hector and the Trojans of being sissies. In medieval times, the fabled knights of King Arthur, no strangers to gamesmanship, often entered jousting contests bragging to opponents about inevitably achieving victory. Even Davy Crockett, our beloved native frontiersman, soldier, and politician, demonstrated similar immodesty, boasting before brawls that he would handily whip any upstarts.
Psych-outs as brinkmanship can work. Trump threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico. In response, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum quickly succumbed to the pressure and agreed to deploy 10,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexican border to stifle fentanyl trafficking and the flow of illegal migrants. The tariff plan has gone on a one-month pause.
Yet the psych-out as bargaining tool is by no means an automatic guarantee of success. Sometimes bullies get a comeuppance. Only minutes after a 10% tariff on products from China was to go into effect, Beijing retaliated with a 10% tariff on our oil and agricultural machinery and a 15% tariff on our coal and liquefied natural gas. In this case, talking tough has escalated into an all-out U.S.-China trade war.
Even so, Trump is unlikely to break character.Whatever issue he confronts, whether deportation policy or tax reform or our potential acquisitions of Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada as the 51st state, or the Gaza Strip, the psych-out will likely serve as his go-to standard operating procedure for the next four years. Underneath it all, he has the same sensibility as your average professional wrestler talking smack in the ring.
So look for our president to slap on the warpaint to do his stuff and induce suspicion and paranoia in faceoffs domestic and foreign, perhaps next with the European Union. He’ll do whatever it takes to rob morale at every opportunity from his perceived nemeses—chuck temper tantrums, throw sucker punches, pound his chest King-Kong-like and gloat over his victories.
Just one problem. Such showdowns run the risk of mutating into nothing but tit-for-tat stalemates. In the end, how can anyone win if everyone loses?
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Read more:
- Tariffs won’t make America great again: Export-Import Bank’s former chairman and president
- Are Trump’s trade and tariffs tantrums repairing market failures or eroding global trust?
- Trump tariffs: Stealing from the China playbook—to boost car making in America
