Wa-a-a-ait, Mr. Postman!

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

To let Donald Trump tell it, the good ship ‘Murica’s sailing through an ocean of deals. Every morning, Americans wake up to news that Trump’s either signed another deal or, more often, is “very close” to signing one.

These ostensible deals have one thing in common: Details are sparse. In some cases, there don’t appear to be any terms, or at least not where terms are ironclad, enforceable commitments and clearly delineated timelines. Deals without terms are like water you can’t drink: Useless, and so may as well not be deals at all.

If you and I do a “deal” and the terms are vague and/or the commitments unenforceable, that’s not really a deal, is it? Imagine a real estate deal where I commit to buy $10 million worth of property and you commit to sell me that property, but the property isn’t specified, the timeframe for the transaction isn’t either, there’s no earnest money for you to collect if I back out and no recourse for me if you don’t deliver the property. Is that a “deal”? Maybe. Under certain conditions and circumstances it could be. But absent context, I’d have to say “no.”

More often than not, Trump’s “deals” are more properly characterized as “frameworks.” The trade arrangement he announced with the UK last week’s a good example. So’s the $1 trillion investment pact Trump and Mohammed bin Salman talked up this week. I could go on. And on.

It’s not always “bullsh-t,” per se. Trump wasn’t lying, for example, to suggest the Saudis will spend hundreds of billions with the US over the next several years. It’s just that once you dig into Trump’s “deals,” terms tend to be nonspecific, details lacking and in some cases, key elements turn out to be carryovers from old contracts.

The White House’s $500 billion “Project Stargate” is a case in point. As Bloomberg noted, despite being “positioned as a new venture, Stargate represents a continuation of deals and partnerships that OpenAI already struck [and] Oracle has said some of the data centers being considered for Stargate were already under construction.”

This is one of, but not the only, reasons Trump was generally considered a joke before he usurped the highest office on Earth. Although voters in Trump country don’t know this, and don’t believe it when you tell them, Trump wasn’t an especially gifted businessman. The great irony of Trump is that far and away his most successful business venture was a gig pretending to be a magnate. He took “fake it ’til you make it” to a whole new level: He made it by faking it.

Think about it this way. If Trump really is history’s greatest dealmaker — as he insists — then pretty much by definition he’d be the Michael Jordan of IB on Wall Street. And yet, if you got every Wall Street dealmaker together in a room and somehow they were all compelled to tell the truth, how many of them would say Trump could do their job for a day, let alone do it better than them for any period of time? None of them. The answer to that question is none of them, again assuming they were compelled to tell the truth.

Given that Trump’s dealmaking persona is pure fiction, and considering how populists come up short when the quick fixes they peddle to the polity don’t work, it comes as no surprise that Trump’s now given up on negotiating bilateral trade deals with all of America’s trade partners.

“We have 150 countries wanting to make a deal, but you’re not able to see that many countries,” an exhausted looking Trump mused, from behind an implausibly dark shade of burnt-orange face paint during a press conference in the Mideast. “So at a certain point over the next two to three weeks, I think Scott and Howard will be sending letters out essentially telling people — and we’ll be very fair — what they’ll be paying to do business in the United States.”

So, just to be clear, Trump’s going to set tariffs like — I don’t know — a state might set a business’s employment tax rate. He’s just going to send a letter in the mail that says “2025 Tax Rate Notice” with a nation’s total exports standing in for the taxable wage base. Countries will need to multiply their exports by the arbitrary assessment rate and make checks payable to Scott Bessent. Keep an eye on the mail! Shades of The Marvelettes.

This is silly on any number of levels. First, the people who really need to know these rates are US importers, because that’s who’s going to be paying the tax, not other countries. So, “Scott and Howard” should address their letters to US businesses and then just CC foreign capitals (and BCC everyone in America, because we’re going to be paying a portion of those levies in the form of higher prices).

Second, we just tried this approach on April 2 and it crashed the stock market by 15% in 15 hours. Then it crashed the bond market. Now we’re going to do it again? I thought the whole point of “Liberation Day” was to establish a maximalist position in order to get leverage in subsequent negotiations. But Trump appears to be suggesting that for most nations, there won’t be any negotiations.

Third, I can only assume the tariff rates he decides on will be lower than those calculated based on the USTR’s widely-lampooned goal-seeking exercise used for the “Liberation Day” rollout. What’s changed since then in terms of concessions from other countries? Pretty much nothing. Trump’s not negotiating with other nations, he’s negotiating with the S&P. And markets sometimes drive a hard bargain.

Fourth, everyone knew 90 days wasn’t going to be enough time to negotiate dozens upon dozens of bilateral trade agreements. Just like everyone knew 90 days wasn’t enough time for the USTR to calculate a bespoke tariff rate for every one of America’s trade partners that accurately reflected their tariff and non-tariff barriers. “Liberation Day” was a debacle. Are we really going to do it again? With these “letters,” Trump’s either going to i) set rates so low as to render the whole exercise pointless, or ii) make the same mistake twice, only this time with an asterisk that references a footnote which reads: “Due to the high volume of inquiries, we’re unable to negotiate your rate at this time.”

To be fair to Trump, I’m sure the idea is to secure bilateral deals with every country who’s a major US trading partner, thereby covering the vast majority of US trade with a newly-negotiated pact. That is: Only “unimportant” countries will have the rate dictated to them in one of Scott and Howard’s “letters.”

Still, this is a laughably slapdash way to go about… well, to go about anything, now that you mention it, and it’ll only serve to underscore the notion that this administration’s hopelessly incompetent. So incompetent, in fact, that it can’t even learn from its own mistakes.

Trump’s effectively saying the following to dozens of countries: “We were going to negotiate with you, but the 90-day constraint we imposed on ourselves probably means we won’t have time, so we’re reverting to Plan A, where that means we’re just going to pick a rate like we did on April 2, only this time it’s non-negotiable, so… hope you like it!”

As Bloomberg explained on Friday, “a lack of manpower and capacity makes it impossible to hold concurrent negotiations with all the countries caught up in the president’s so-called reciprocal tariffs plan.” Of all the solutions to that problem, easily the worst is to just revert to a strategy that entails picking a rate and imposing it with no input from the target country.

So, no deals, as it turns out. Or at least not for most nations. Imagine that. I can only assume this means the penguins of the Heard and McDonald islands won’t be invited to The White House for trade talks anytime soon.

Now do yourself a favor: Scroll back up to the top of this article, play The Marvelettes and look at the penguin picture. You’re welcome.