Donald Trump, CEO-in-Chief: How the president’s dealmaking instincts are shaking up business and the government

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On Dec. 3, 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang walked into the Oval Office for a one-on-one meeting. The only other person privy to the conversation was the current occupant, Donald Trump. Huang later said only that they “talked in general about export controls,” and Trump said almost nothing about the meeting. But five days later, Trump and Nvidia announced an extraordinary policy shift: Rather than continue to be classified as a serious crime, sending Nvidia’s H200 chips to China was suddenly not just allowed—it was a welcome new source of revenue, with the U.S. government extracting a 25% share of every chip sold.

The deal was vintage Trump and a telling anecdote for business leaders about how the business world now works under Trump 2.0. In the first year of his second term, Trump has rewritten the government’s relationship with business more radically than any predecessor. He started by imposing new tariffs on scores of countries, scrambling business models at millions of companies big and small. He has intervened in other ways. 

Some CEOs, especially in tech, praise him fulsomely. But when CEOs speak anonymously in surveys, they don’t seem any happier, collectively, after a year of Trump’s pro-business policies. In the fall 2024 Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey, conducted just after that year’s presidential election, 61% of CEOs said they were “optimistic or very optimistic for my industry.” A year later, under Trump, only 47% felt that way, while those who felt pessimistic or very pessimistic more than doubled, from 10% to 22%. 

Why the disconnect? It has a lot to do with the president’s leadership style. Though we’re only one year in, three clear themes have come to define that style. Above all, his love of one-on-one deals. Second, his practiced element of unpredictability. Finally, his penchant for grabbing the deal without sweating the details. Deals have always been inherent in politics, but Trump’s devotion to them is different. In every relationship, problem, and wish, he can find a deal, and he revels in it. 

That propensity is deeply seated. It rises from his career as the third generation in his family’s real estate business, immersed in it from childhood. The Trump Organization is not like a Fortune 500 corporation. Privately held, it doesn’t report to thousands of shareholders. While it has thousands of employees, decision-making is concentrated in just a few: The head office at Trump Tower in New York is small, maybe 40 people, estimates someone who has worked with Trump for years. The company’s operations consist mostly of building, buying, selling, and leasing properties, and licensing the Trump brand—and all those activities require mostly negotiating deals. 

So why does Trump’s love of the deal feel so disruptive—thrillingly so to supporters, alarmingly so to others—in his role as president? 

For one thing, trust in the federal government has hovered at abysmal lows for more than a decade—due in no small part to its perceived inability to accomplish anything positive. Thanks to partisan gridlock, passing meaningful reforms takes months if it happens at all—implementing them through regulations takes years. In this stale atmosphere, Trump-style deals can feel liberatingly fresh; they can be done with an hour-long one-on-one and a handshake. 

Just as important, unlike with many laws and regulations, deals usually give at least one party a quantifiable financial win. (Trump, needless to say, wants to always be that party.) On the economic and trade fronts, the Trump administration repeatedly leaves the table with a tweetable return on investment—$30 billion a month in tariff income, $100 billion in new Apple factories, a 10% stake in Intel.

Without question, Trump’s policies are taking the government—and business—in directions they have never gone before. He’s doing so, as he’s done for years, with a steamroller-like disdain for legal and cultural norms— showing no hesitation about threatening or punishing critics, and dismissing complaints about policies that reward his donors and industries in which his own family has business interests. And what makes the current moment even more fascinating, and fraught, is that, roughly one year in, it’s still too early to tell whether all of this glass-shattering is working—or whether it’s sustainable. 

To understand Trump’s unprecedented style of carrying out presidential duties, it’s necessary to know his revelations about himself. In a 2019 interview with Bob Woodward, he said, “My whole life has been deals…I’ve made unbelievable deals—from very little, made great deals. That’s what I do.” And in his 2015 book Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, he explained a key element of his dealing style: “I don’t want people to know exactly what I’m doing—or thinking. I like being unpredictable. It keeps them off balance.” Those intertwined tenets illuminate much of how Trump operates as president.

Whether the tools Trump is using are the right ones to fix the country’s largest problems remains to be seen. 

Beyond dealmaking, how has Trump fared on the managerial front? The broadest example is his high-profile and often chaotic rush to downsize the executive branch. By the numbers, he succeeded: The federal workforce is some 270,000 fewer than when Trump was sworn in. But research by the Brookings Institution finds that many agencies that fired hundreds or thousands of employees are rehiring them.  One thing is clear overall: The dealmaker presidency is unpopular with many voters.

Trump’s lifelong three-part operating system—skillful one-on-one deals plus unpredictability and pushing ahead while others work on the details—has served him well. He’s rich and he’s president. But his system may not be ideal for solving the largest problems at the apex of power in the world’s wealthiest nation, says Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University who held positions in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

No number of one-on-one negotiations, for example, will stop the national debt from growing faster than the economy. The government’s largest expenditure, Social Security, is on track to drain the last dollars from its trust funds in 2033. In the 1980s, a 15-member bipartisan commission rescued Social Security by agreeing on several technical changes. That process was slow, undramatic, and involved a lot of hairsplitting compromises. It was more like governing than dealmaking. 

The past year also suggests Trump’s legacy of governing may be surprisingly ephemeral. He finds legislation slow and tiring, preferring to govern through hundreds of executive orders, but they can be revoked by any president to follow. The substance of his many one-on-one deals—such as with Nvidia’s Huang—may evaporate when he is no longer president. His agreements with leaders of nations could likewise disappear because those deals aren’t treaties, signed by Trump and ratified by the Senate.

In 2017, Trump became the first U.S. president with no experience in paid government work, including in the military. Business is his world. But ultimately, “running a country is not about making money,” says Heidi Crebo-Rediker, the U.S. State Department’s chief economist in the Obama administration and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And even if Trump wants to run the country like a business, it’s not a CEO job.”

Donald Trump, the world’s most famous CEO, clearly disagrees. And to tackle the thorny financial and economic crises the nation faces, more business acumen and strategic thinking in government could be a valuable asset. But President Trump’s job, unlike a CEO’s, is subject to the Constitution, elections, and a 535-member board of directors, and it demands that the president deliver benefits to an even bigger group of stakeholders: all Americans. Those diverging missions, which put business and government in eternal contention, have over time served the country extraordinarily well. 

Bottom line: Great CEOs can be American heroes, but it’s not yet clear if history will bestow that distinction on presidents who think they’re CEOs.

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