Q&A: Why Trump failed to negotiate a heath-care deal

A number of parties share the blame for the Republicans' failed effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act: The GOP's hard-line Freedom Caucus. More moderate Republicans who couldn't get behind a bill that cut health care for millions of Americans. Paul Ryan's inability to whip his party into line. The rushed timeline and many last-minute changes to a bill that just 17 percent of Americans supported.

And if you believe President Donald Trump, the Democrats - though he reportedly never made an effort to reach out to them.

Yet Trump is the one who campaigned on his negotiating prowess and his ability to make big, beautiful deals. That included repealing the Affordable Care Act. He tweeted in February 2016 that if he won he would "immediately repeal and replace Obamacare - and nobody can do that like me." In October, he said he would ask Congress to put a bill on his desk his first day in office, noting "it's going to be so easy." As recently as last week, his press secretary called him "the closer."

Yet in the end, Trump couldn't get the deal done. As The Washington Post reported, he cajoled and charmed, flattered and entertained. He worked the phones. He issued vague threats of retribution - "I'm gonna come after you," he said in a meeting with the House Freedom Caucus last week.

So what happened? The Post spoke with Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra, who wrote the 2016 book "Negotiating the Impossible," a title that aptly describes the situation Republicans faced with their health care bill. Malhotra, who has been critical of Trump's approach to negotiating in the past, has advised companies engaged in mergers as well as governments. We spoke about ultimatums, threats and the role a little humility can play in negotiating such high-stakes deals. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: We've now come out of Trump's first big negotiation as president. It failed. What was the first thing he did wrong?

A: Unlike when you're doing a real estate deal or a deal where you're going to be putting your name on a product that already exists, when you're doing a complex deal with lots of parties, lots of interests, lots of constraints, you really need to map out exactly how you're going to get from day one to day 50 or 100. It seems that President Trump's approach in this case was very much day-to-day, hour-to-hour. That rarely goes right.

You can get lucky. But if you're not taking into account how things are going to play out for the many parities who have very different interests and perspectives than you do, you're probably going to make some mistakes along the way. As an example, it was never clear whether Trump was really for or sort of for it, and it changed over time. It wasn't clear if he was in charge of selling it or other people were in charge of selling it. He hedged on whether he wanted his name associated with it. There's so many parts where you see that there was no grand strategy. There were a bunch of tactical moves that were loosely tied together.

Q: What's the biggest difference between negotiating a business deal and the sort of multiparty, high-stakes, legislative deals that Trump faced with health care?

A: For most people, when you think about a business deal, the image you have in your mind is that you walk into a room and there's a pile of money on the table. How can you get as much of it as you can for yourself? Another way of putting it is there's a lot of ways of getting the deal done. You're trying to get it done on your terms.

That's not how it works when you're doing a multiparty negotiation, whether it's policy or international conflict. The image that there's a lot of ways to get this deal done and you're going to find the most advantageous one for yourself is completely flawed. If you're lucky, there's one way of getting this deal done. If you can push and pull people to get enough of an overlap in interest and willingness to say yes, you might be able to get the one deal done that's out there for the doing.

You cannot walk in there dictating terms. You can't walk in there with ultimatums. You can't walk in there pretending that you know and they don't know. Instead, what you need to do is work with these people and figure out a way to knock down the barriers that stand in the way of all of you and that one deal.

Q: You've written that ultimatums are usually a bad idea, yet Trump issued a huge one - put it to a vote or I'll move on - and it didn't work. Why?

A: Ultimatums are only going to work if you feel that you're already at a place where the other side, if push came to shove, would say yes rather than no and you just want to force the decision. You don't want to make an ultimatum if the best offer you've presented so far is not something they could possibly say yes to. On some level, that's the mistake.

One of two things is going on. Perhaps Trump really didn't understand that the people who were saying "no" were really meaning no. The other is he understood that not only is this a deal-breaker for them, but there's nothing he could do to get this deal done for them, and he just wanted to get it over with and move on to something else. Which of those two it is, it's hard to know.

Now the part that's been a little bit missed in this - the part where I think you can sort of understand why he would do this - is he didn't just say "there has to be a vote tomorrow, otherwise we're not going to revisit this for a while." He actually said "if there's no vote tomorrow, we're done with Obamacare completely."

That is a reasonable way of forcing someone to really step back and say "Oh my God, this is my last chance on it ... If this is going to be the only chance ever, maybe I should just take the deal that's on the table." In a sense, he made the ultimate ultimatum. It's a gamble. He went all out. But it's Trump, so if a year or two from now he decides to revisit it, nobody's going to be that surprised.

Q: He gave the ultimatum but then he didn't follow through on it. He said we're going to have a vote on Friday but they didn't. What does that do when he sends forward his next ultimatum?

A: My advice on making ultimatums is usually: Don't make ultimatums unless you will follow through on them. Obviously the purpose of an ultimatum is you shouldn't have to follow through on it. You hope that the "or else" doesn't happen and that the ultimatum is enough.

What I always tell my clients and students is to first try to look for other ways of solving your problem without resorting to an ultimatum because one of the things it does is it rubs people the wrong way. It makes other people escalate the conflict a little bit further on their end. It puts you in a difficult spot later. Even if you are willing to pull the trigger, think about less aggressive ways of trying to resolve the problem before you get to that last resort.

Q: A report from Axios said that Trump senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon went into a meeting with the Freedom Caucus at the White House and his opening line was "Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill." Does starting with a line like that have a place in successful negotiations?

A: It's not something that can't work. It's just that it's unlikely to work. It's the kind of move you can make when you've earned it. If you've been there and bled with these people and they know that you care about them - you've been there over many months or years - then you can, once in a while, call upon people. You can say "listen, this one's not going to be a debate. This time I'm going to tell you what to do."

Either that, or if you are a dictator you can do it all the time because you've got military force or you can send them to the gulag if they don't do it.

Q: Trump also made threats this past week, reportedly saying "I'm going to come after you" to members who didn't vote for it. That doesn't seem like a way to help the other side "save face," as you've written is important.

A: In negotiations, some people would rather frame it as "here's the benefits" and some people would rather frame it as "here's the cost of not doing it." He chose one and not the other, and that's OK. But when and how that was done has an auxiliary consequence, which is that it made Trump look desperate. If you're having to publicly threaten your own people - people in your own party - to get in line at that point in the negotiation, at that point in the process, it makes you look desperate.

One of the problems of looking desperate is that it gives those who are not so sure they want to do this a license not to do it. It sends a signal, it sends a message, that there are a lot of people who just do not want to do this, that there may be something wrong ... The moment you say that you are not quite conceding defeat, but that you are on the path to defeat. And that in itself can create its own momentum.

Q: He talks a lot about leading by instinct. How much does instinct become a problem in negotiations? Or is it helpful?

A: My life revolves around beating instincts out of people. That doesn't mean they're always wrong. It's just that when the stakes are high, instincts need to be audited. Here's the thing: Instincts are useful and practical if you're doing the same deal over and over again. If this is the hundredth time you're doing a land deal of this kind, your instincts pretty much capture everything you need to think about. But if you find yourself in a new environment, a kind of deal you haven't done before - or you're doing legislation as opposed to transactions, as in this case - your instincts are the last thing you should be relying on.

There was the statement about "nobody knew health care could be so complicated." Then in remarks after repeal and replace failed, he talked about how he learned a lot about the procedures, the arcane processes or something like that. To me, that's kind of sad, to use a Trumpian word. You shouldn't have to learn these things as a result. These are the kinds of things you should be gearing up for with complete focus and energy.

Q: Anything else that was overlooked in this negotiation? Final thoughts?

A: The word that does come to mind, which I think seems lacking here - and not just with President Trump, but often when people start doing things that are much harder and bigger than they're used to - is "humility." I don't know of anybody who has been extremely successful when they've taken on something much bigger than they're used to without a good dose of humility. Humility is what forces you to be prepared. Humility is what forces you to say "I don't know everything" or "I don't fully understand all these people, so I'm going to have to listen rather than just tell them how things are."

If I was going to give some advice, honestly, that would be it. You don't win by just applying your skills and your strengths blindly in the way you've always done it.