THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

To listen to him, he is the world's greatest deal maker. Everything he has had a hand in is the biggest, most beautiful, wonderful whatever. But when the hub-bub dies down, the hoopla goes away and the smoke clears all he ever has is bupkus. The Great Orange Bunkum can't swing a deal to save his life.

President Trump likes nothing more than presenting himself as the ultimate deal maker, the master negotiator who can translate his success in business into the worlds of politics, policy and diplomacy. “That’s what I do, is deals,” he said one day last month.

Except that so far he has not. As he threw in the towel on immigration legislation on Friday, saying that Republicans should give up even trying until after the fall midterm elections, Mr. Trump once again fell short of his promise to make “beautiful” deals that no other president could make.

His 17 months in office have in fact been an exercise in futility for the art-of-the-deal president. No deal on immigration. No deal on health care. No deal on gun control. No deal on spending cuts. No deal on Nafta. No deal on China trade. No deal on steel and aluminum imports. No deal on Middle East peace. No deal on the Qatar blockade. No deal on Syria. No deal on Russia. No deal on Iran. No deal on climate change. No deal on Pacific trade.

Even routine deals sometimes elude Mr. Trump, or he chooses to blow them up. After a Group of 7 summit meeting this month with the world’s leading economic powers, Mr. Trump, expressing pique at Canada’s prime minister, refused to sign the carefully negotiated communiqué that his own team had agreed to. It was the sort of boilerplate agreement that every previous president had made over four decades.

“Trump is an anarchist,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, who became a sharp critic. “It was his approach in business, it is his approach as president. It does not take good negotiating skills to cause chaos. Will this ever lead to concessions? Maybe, but concessions to what? Not anything that resembles a deal. I just do not see him getting much done.”

Ultimately, his advisers said, his hard-line positions that for now have left him at an impasse with negotiating partners should pay off in ways that did not for presidents like Barack Obama and George W. Bush. “I don’t think it’s that counterintuitive to say that playing hardball will lead to better trade deals eventually,” said Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist and former aide to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump points to a few deals, notably the major tax-cutting package that passed late last year. But even that was negotiated mainly by Republican lawmakers, who said Mr. Trump did not seem engaged in the details. Nor did he secure the bipartisan support he had hoped for. And as legislative challenges go, handing out tax cuts without paying for them is not exactly the hardest thing that politicians do.

As for foreign policy, Mr. Trump has taken great pride in his recent meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, asserting that “I have solved that problem” after a decades-long nuclear standoff and even musing that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. But there is no deal, at least not yet. There is a vague 391-word statement essentially agreeing to agree, an expression of a goal with no details.

Smoke and mirrors, fustian and bombast, extreme bloviating, call it what you will Mango Muffinbutt can't make a deal because he knows nothing about negotiating and has gotten rid of the people who did do the serious work. And he refuses to alter his blustery hard line positions thinking it is a loss of face to do so. And so we have a president who spends his time blowing it out his ass.