FT's Janan Ganesh: Businessman Trump learns not everyone has a price

Key topics:Trump cannot grasp people acting from conviction or ideology.Iran and Ukraine resist US pressure due to strong beliefs.Surrounding himself with cynics worsens Trump's foreign misreads..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Janan Ganesh.Who is the anti-Trump? The human opposite of him? Robert Mueller, who once investigated the US president, had a strong claim. He spent the great bulk of his career in unremunerative public life. He joined the Marines because a friend died in the corps, not despite that fact. In obituaries since his own death last month, the word “integrity” recurs. Donald Trump instead went with: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” Perhaps this wasn’t just personal animus talking but also total mystification at the values of someone like Mueller.Trump does not understand people who believe in things. Recognise this blind spot, and his current struggles abroad become easier to explain.If Iran has put up more of a fight than he had expected, that is because it really is devoted to certain causes. The survival of the Islamic revolution is one. National amour propre is another, for the less theologically minded in the regime. Then there is plain hatred of America and Israel. You need not admire these beliefs to recognise their motivating power in Tehran.Trump struggles to make that imaginative leap: to think himself into the mind of a zealot. To this businessman, Iranian slogans (“The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader”) sound like the opening bluster of a negotiation. It is the equivalent of quoting an extortionate price for a distressed asset. That Iran means it — that anyone means anything — strikes him as incredible..Read more:.Ian Bremmer: Ukraine’s game-changer ends belief Russian victory ‘inevitable’.Consider the other foreign policy failure of his second term. It genuinely baffles Trump that he cannot foist a quick settlement on the warring parties in Ukraine. It baffles almost no one else. Ukrainians believe in their independent nationhood. Vladimir Putin is no less attached to the idea of a Greater Russia that includes Ukraine. And so the conflict, while terrible, is not weird or anomalous — except to someone who cannot believe that other people believe.Trump has been irreverent enough about Americans who are captured or maimed in the line of service. How is he to fathom foreigners who make that sacrifice?There is a kind of cynicism so extreme that it crosses over into naivety. If Trump will not credit that people often act out of conviction, that human behaviour can have a moral or ideological root, he isn’t “red-pilled”. He isn’t “based”. He just has a faulty picture of the world. And so, as we are seeing, a lack of purchase on world events.His colleagues are open about his confusion in the face of other people’s intransigent beliefs. According to his envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump found it “curious” that Iran did not surrender as soon as the US amassed force in the region. All that firepower should have scared the regime into making concessions. “And yet it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.” Adorable.Or consider this from JD Vance about his boss’s way of thinking: “Rather than Russia and Ukraine killing one another, why don’t they actually engage in some commerce with one another . . . ?” In other words, how could people let national feeling get in the way of win-win economics? No one is more damning about Trump than a colleague striving to praise him.His cynicism is sometimes borne out, of course. When he raised tariffs on Europe a year ago, the continent more or less folded. At home, the GOP is made up of once-proud men and women who abased themselves to him in return for high office or a quiet life. Given how often Trump has seen people forfeit their ideals under duress, he can be excused his low view of humankind: his belief in the essential negotiability of everyone. He is right often enough.When he is wrong, however, the consequences are world-changing. China countered his tariffs with its own. A year on, it seems the saner if not the more attractive superpower. Ukraine did not submit to Trump’s invidious peace plan and has lived to fight on. But the example that should shatter the Trump worldview is Iran. The regime turns out to have the ideological conviction to sustain a fight, not just the military assets.If Trump had true believers around him, he might at least gain a vicarious insight into how some foreign governments think. Instead, he has the likes of Vance, a former moderate who turned hard right when it became convenient to do so. Marco Rubio is another changeling. Witkoff and Jared Kushner are commercial animals. Stephen Miller is a rare zealot, with no cabinet rank. And the “administration”, if an increasingly crowded gravy train can be so dignified, sits on top of a Maga base that has reversed its opinion about foreign wars essentially overnight.The theme here is not “fascism” — a word cheapened through overuse — but almost total emptiness. Of course, a government of spivs and cynics is not the worst thing. (Try a government of fanatics.) But it is ill-equipped to understand and therefore to navigate a world of sincere believers, whether these be Chinese communists, Russian irredentists or Iranian clerics..Read more:.Putin’s long game: How Trump’s Iran focus hands Russia the upper hand in Ukraine - Marc Champion.In the end, Trump is what might be called a rightwing Marxist. He is sure that material interest is what drives people, that ideals are mere dressing for base motives. It is hard to conceive of a president less suited to taking on a revolutionary state in war. The lesson of the past month, though obvious, might be too much for a man of Trump’s commercial ken to accept. Not everyone has a price..© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.

FT's Janan Ganesh: Businessman Trump learns not everyone has a price

Related Stories

Foreign hands or a failing government? Why Lamola's protest conspiracy theory doesn't hold up

Simon Johnson & Amir Kermani on BizNews: Four scenarios that will decide the fate of the Strait of Hormuz

Ray Hartley - BRICS loses its clout

BN Daybreak - Tue 12 May 2026: US-Iran conflict; Fed leadership; Boxer’s expansion; Whistleblower safety; Keir Starmer