From Hot-Potato Questions to Teachable

Moments: Using Analysis and Meta-

Evaluation to Address Trump in the
Negotiation Classroom
Melissa Manwaring

Introduction
Like it or not, negotiation instructors should be prepared to address
questions about President Donald Trump-as-negotiator. Trump has
staked much of his identity on his negotiation skills: as a businessman,
as a candidate, and now as president (Latz 2018). In this context, stu-
dents will naturally wonder how Trump’s negotiation moves – and his
frequent commentary about them – might illustrate, reinforce, or contra-
dict what they are learning in class.
Some negotiation instructors may proactively incorporate a study of
Trump into their courses. Others, however, will avoid purposeful men-
tion of Trump, viewing the issue as a pedagogical “hot potato.” Perhaps
they feel insufficiently informed to comment, that discussing Trump
would distract from other goals, or that it would be imprudent to assess
a rapidly evolving live case study with long-term impacts still unknown.
Moreover, Trump is a highly polarizing figure. Because comments about
the president might be construed to signal a particular political view,
some negotiation instructors may avoid commentary altogether so as
not to alienate or silence students whose own views may differ. This
may seem ironic, given that negotiation education typically involves
learning to manage different opinions and perceptions. The power dy-
namic inherent in the instructor–student relationship, however, may un-
derstandably generate concerns about instructor bias against students
with differing political views, and about potential – if unintentional –
consequences for issues such as grades and faculty recommendations
(Brookfield 1995).

Melissa Manwaring is senior lecturer in management at Babson College in Wellesley,

Massachusetts. Her e-mail address is mmanwaring@babson.edu.

10.1111/nejo.12270
© 2019 Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School Negotiation Journal  January 2019  211
 At the same time, Trump is so persistently in the news as a negotia-
tor that students may raise their own questions or comments about him,
either in the larger classroom setting or privately with an instructor.
How then might the instructor respond, if she is reluctant to express
her personal opinion? Two approaches, an analytic approach and a me-
ta-evaluative approach, may help constructively connect such questions
or comments with negotiation course content.

The Analytic Approach to Trump in the Classroom

With the analytic approach, an instructor simply analyzes – or asks
students to analyze - the extent to which Trump’s explicit negotia-
tion behavior illustrates negotiation dynamics or principles. Questions
might be designed to call on diagnostic skills (e.g. “what specific tactics
have you noticed Trump and/or his counterparts using in X context?”).
Alternatively, questions might encourage real-world recognition of the-
ories and concepts (e.g. “can you think of an instance in which Trump
explicitly referred to his best alternative to a negotiated agreement?”),
or support more inductive concept development through the study of
multiple examples. In this way, students might recognize Trump’s threat
to pull out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) without a
revised financial structure as an example of an ultimatum, or view his
tweets before and after his in-person meeting with North Korean leader
Kim Jong Un as a form of third-dimension “away-from-the-table” ma-
neuvering (Lax and Sebenius 2006), or identify a pattern of techniques,
such as aggressive anchoring, that Trump has used in multiple contexts
(Latz 2018, chapter 2).
Even Trump’s campaign strategies could be analyzed as a form of
negotiation with voters (see Kapoutsis and Volkema in this issue), using
influence techniques such as loss aversion (e.g., claims that immigrants
– or Democrats – will “take your jobs”). As in an “issue-spotting” prob-
lem typical of law schools, speculating on Trump’s intent or assessing
his effectiveness would be unnecessary – indeed, an instructor could es-
tablish ground rules stating as much. The approach focuses on the man-
ifestation of certain negotiation concepts in a current, real-life context.
What if students explicitly ask or comment about Trump’s negotia-
tion effectiveness? While some instructors may simply share their own
evaluations, instructors who prefer not to do so might instead move to
meta-evaluation: in other words, they might frame the discussion in
terms of how to measure negotiation success. In response to the ques-
tion “Is Trump a good negotiator?”, one can ask “What does it mean
to be a good negotiator? What criteria might we use to answer that
question?” In response to the question of “Is he effective?”, we might
respond “Effective for what purpose? And for whose purposes?” Rather

212  Manwaring  From Hot-Potato Questions to Teachable Moments

than jumping to an assessment, the instructor can push students to
think hard about how to assess a president-as-negotiator.
This meta-evaluation can be highly complex. For example, a stu-
dent might propose that Trump is an effective negotiator if he achieves
his stated goals. One might point to certain concrete goals that Trump
has achieved in the political sphere alone, in part through negotiation:
for instance, he was nominated and then elected; he worked with cer-
tain members of Congress to secure confirmation of two Supreme Court
Justices; he arranged with North Korea for the remains of fallen U.S.
military to be repatriated for burial. If the relevant criteria for success
relate to achieving certain stated, short-term goals, Trump has achieved
some success. Even if one suspects that Trump has additional unstated
goals – such as personal enrichment, distraction from perceived threats
such as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian inter-
ference in the 2016 election, or the systematic dismantling of various
federal agencies – one might find examples of apparent success.
If the relevant criteria are more subjective, intangible, or longer-term,
however, the assessment might be different. An instructor might push
students to consider these criteria with questions like: what kind of
precedent has Trump’s negotiation approach set for future interactions
with Congress and domestic agencies? How have his negotiation tactics
affected his personal relationship with world leaders as well as present
and future U.S. alliances? What influence has Trump had on U.S. “soft
power” and hortatory influence on human rights, climate change, and
other issues of global concern?
In encouraging students to think through the various measures of
presidential negotiation success – and how they might differ from mea-
sures of individual or organizational negotiation success – an instructor
might ask them to consider different stakeholder perspectives. To what
extent might the president’s apparent measures of his own success align
with or diverge from those of his own cabinet, for instance? What about
various Congressional coalitions, his political base, the United States as
a nation, or individuals and nations around the world? The instructor
might connect these questions with a study of coalitions, whose mem-
bers often work toward the same concrete goals for different reasons
and who may have different measures of success.
Any of these conversations can easily become passionate and/or
political. At the same time, if the instructor encourages students to focus
on either using negotiation theories to analyze Trump-as-negotiator,
or developing criteria to evaluate him, potentially from multiple stake-
holder perspectives, then even unexpected questions or comments
about Trump can generate teachable moments. Finally, if it turns out
that a classroom is fundamentally unable to handle a “hot potato” by

Negotiation Journal  January 2019  213

holding an analytical or a meta-evaluative conversation about Trump as
negotiator, then reflecting that back to the classroom presents, in itself,
a teachable moment.

REFERENCES
Brookfield, S. D. 1995. Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Kapoutsis, I., and R. Volkema. 2019. Hard-core toughie: Donald Trump’s negotiations for the
United States presidency. Negotiation Journal 35(1): 47–63.
Latz, M. E. 2018. The real Trump deal: An eye-opening look at how he really negotiates.
Phoenix, AZ: Life Success Press.
Lax, D. A., and J. K. Sebenius. 2006. 3-D negotiation: Powerful tools to change the game in
your most important deals. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

214  Manwaring  From Hot-Potato Questions to Teachable Moments