# Post x_995746011321597953 - Post ID: `x_995746011321597953` - Platform: X (Twitter) - Posted: 2018-05-13T19:22:03.000Z (UTC) - Deleted: no - Repost: no - Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/x_995746011321597953 - Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/x_995746011321597953/analysis - Audio narration: https://static.trump.fm/audio/x_995746011321597953.mp3 (a synthesized voice reading the post text, not a recording) ## Post text > China and the United States are working well together on trade, but past negotiations have been so one sided in favor of China, for so many years, that it is hard for them to make a deal that benefits both countries. But be cool, it will all work out! ## Engagement - Likes: 101,153 - Reposts: 19,916 - Replies: 0 - Views: unknown - Metrics collected: 2026-01-31T23:43:13.403Z (UTC) # Analysis _Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-03-14T22:44:44.682Z (UTC): a model's reading of this post, not his words. Its psychological terms describe the language, not a clinical assessment of him._ ## Summary This low-intensity post serves a spin-management function immediately following the same-day ZTE tweet, in which Trump announced personal intervention to rescue a sanctioned Chinese telecom firm. The sequence reveals a characteristic pattern: after a potentially damaging diplomatic concession, Trump reasserts historical grievance against the same party ("so one sided in favor of China, for so many years"), reframing the concession within a larger toughness narrative. The "be cool, it will all work out!" sign-off performs paternal authority — a command to the audience to surrender anxiety to his competence, while implying he alone transcends the problem. Authorship is assessed as authentic Trump (72%), consistent with Sunday posting and unmistakably casual register. Narcissistic state is mildly grandiose but subdued: the dealmaker persona operates in maintenance/spin mode rather than injury-triggered mode. No cognitive concern markers; complexity is consistent with 2018 baseline. The primary defense is rationalization, with mild historical distortion in service of the perpetual-victim-nation schema. Clinically unremarkable relative to baseline, but rhetorically instructive as a transparent counter-spin move following a vulnerable diplomatic action. ## Post Analysis: x_995746011321597953 (2018-05-13) ### Authorship Attribution **Local time:** 3:22 PM EDT (UTC−4; Trump likely at White House on Mother's Day Sunday). Business-adjacent hours lean slightly toward aide, but Sunday and the unmistakably Trumpian register ("be cool, it will all work out!") point strongly toward authentic authorship or minimal aide polish. The syntactic looseness — a single run-on sentence structure with "but... for so many years... that it is hard" — and the breezy, colloquial sign-off are stylistic signatures inconsistent with Scavino's typically cleaner prose. Assessment: **authentic Trump**, likely typed or dictated with minimal intervention. --- ### Contextual Frame This post must be read in sequence with the immediately preceding ZTE tweet on the same day, in which Trump announced he was personally intervening to rescue a sanctioned Chinese telecom firm ("Too many jobs in China lost"). That post generated swift domestic criticism — helping a Chinese company that violated US sanctions looked like a diplomatic quid pro quo with Xi. This follow-up post functions as preemptive spin management: establishing a "we're working together" frame while simultaneously blaming prior administrations for trade imbalances, thereby neutralizing the vulnerability of appearing soft on China by projecting it onto predecessors. --- ### Level 1: Dispositional Traits - **Extraversion** (high): Assertive directorial tone ("be cool"), positive affect, confident social address - **Agreeableness** (below baseline): Cooperative surface framing conceals competitive historical grievance ("so one sided in favor of China, for so many years") - **Conscientiousness** (low): Breezy dismissal of policy complexity; no specifics - **Neuroticism** (markedly low relative to baseline): No hostility, no agitation — unusual calm - **Openness** (low): Formulaic framing, no analytical depth The low-neuroticism reading is itself informative: this post is performing calm authority, not expressing it organically, which fits the spin-management interpretation. --- ### Level 2: Characteristic Adaptations **Agency motives dominant:** Trump positions himself as the capable dealmaker who will succeed where predecessors failed. The implicit message: *I understand the problem (one-sidedness), I have the relationship (Xi), and I will deliver (it will all work out)*. This is achievement and power motive expressed through confident reassurance. **Schema revealed:** History is a record of elite incompetence and national victimization; Trump uniquely transcends it. This is the core operative schema across his trade and foreign policy posts. --- ### Level 3: Narrative Identity - **Protagonist role:** Competent dealmaker / patient patriarch ("be cool") — notably softer than the warrior/fighter frame common in his domestic political posts - **Redemption sequence:** Past (one-sided losses for years) → present (working well together) → future (it will all work out) — a clean three-beat redemption arc - **Contrasting other:** Unnamed prior negotiators, implicitly Obama and predecessors, who enabled the one-sidedness - **Identity claim:** "I see clearly what others missed, and I can fix it" The "be cool" directive is psychologically notable: it is a command issued from a position of assumed authority, addressed simultaneously to markets, allies, critics, and the public. It claims ownership of the situation's emotional register. --- ### Level 4: Clinical Indicators **Narcissistic state:** Mildly **grandiose** — subdued by this subject's standards. No rage, no devaluation, no explicit self-aggrandizement. The grandiosity is structural rather than explicit: the calm confidence that *he alone* can resolve decades of trade imbalance is the grandiose claim, not stated directly. **Trigger:** Supply-seeking / maintenance combined with preemptive attack management. The ZTE post exposed him to criticism; this post manages that exposure by re-establishing his tough-on-China-in-the-long-run credentials. **Defense mechanisms:** - **Rationalization (neurotic):** The acknowledgment of difficulty ("it is hard for them to make a deal") functions as a rationalization that manages expectations while preserving the success narrative - **Distortion (pathological, mild):** The framing of ALL past US-China negotiations as uniformly one-sided reshapes a complex economic history into a simple victimhood narrative **Narcissistic rage:** Absent. This post operates without the hostility characteristic of injury-triggered posts. --- ### Rhetorical Analysis - **Appeal to authority (self):** The confidence of "it will all work out" derives entirely from implied personal efficacy - **Historical grievance framing:** "For so many years" invokes long-accumulated wrong without specifying anything verifiable - **Audience management / reassurance:** "But be cool" is a paternal command that presupposes the audience needs calming and that Trump is the appropriate figure to provide it - **Implicit whataboutism:** Criticism of ZTE intervention is preempted by pivoting to historical unfairness under prior administrations - **Understatement as dominance signal:** Trivializing a complex geopolitical-economic negotiation ("it will all work out!") signals confidence bordering on dismissiveness No dehumanizing language. No violent imagery. No stochastic terrorism indicators. --- ### Cognitive Status No markers of concern. Sentence structure is characteristically loose but internally coherent. No word-finding pauses, no paraphasia, no temporal confusion. The post is syntactically simpler than educated prose baseline but consistent with this subject's established register. **No deviation from 2018 baseline.** --- ### Fact Verification | Claim | Verdict | Evidence | |-------|---------|----------| | "China and the United States are working well together on trade" | **Half True** | Active bilateral talks were occurring, but the US had already imposed steel/aluminum tariffs in March 2018 and was preparing $50B+ in Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods. 'Working well together' significantly overstates cooperation. | | "past negotiations have been so one sided in favor of China, for so many years" | **Mostly False** | The US ran a ~$375B goods trade deficit with China in 2017, and legitimate concerns about IP theft and market access existed. However, characterizing all bilateral negotiations as uniformly one-sided ignores US concessions won in WTO and bilateral contexts, and conflates trade deficits (driven by macroeconomic factors) with negotiating failures. | | "it is hard for them to make a deal that benefits both countries" | **Unverifiable** | Opinion statement about negotiating difficulty; not a falsifiable factual claim. | Overall Veracity: 40% ## Authorship Analysis **Self-Written** (score: 72%) ### Indicators - 'Be cool, it will all work out!' is stylistically authentic Trump — casual, confident, colloquial sign-off inconsistent with aide prose - Loose run-on sentence structure with subordinate clauses typical of Trump's spoken/typed register - Sunday posting (Mother's Day) reduces aide likelihood; Trump more likely self-posting on weekends - 3:22 PM EDT is within business hours, which slightly complicates attribution - No typos or ALL CAPS, which slightly lowers authentic score ## Psychological Profile ### State **Grandiose State** **Trigger:** Preemptive Attack (Expected domestic criticism of ZTE intervention announced in preceding tweet) Sentiment: +0.30 ### Clinical **Malignant Narcissism:** - Narcissistic: 35% - Antisocial: 10% - Paranoid: 10% - Sadism: 0% **Defense Mechanisms:** - rationalization (neurotic) - distortion (pathological) **Cognitive Complexity:** - Complexity: 28% **Parasocial Techniques:** - Paternal reassurance command ('be cool') presupposes audience emotional dependency on subject's authority - First-person collective framing ('China and the United States are working well together') implies personal agency in bilateral relations ## Fact Checks (3) _The model's verdicts from 2026-03-14._ > China and the United States are working well together on trade **HALF TRUE** Active bilateral talks were occurring, but the US had already imposed steel/aluminum tariffs in March 2018 and was preparing $50B+ in Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods. 'Working well together' significantly overstates cooperation. Sources: General knowledge: US-China trade war timeline 2018 > past negotiations have been so one sided in favor of China, for so many years **MOSTLY FALSE** The US ran a ~$375B goods trade deficit with China in 2017, and legitimate concerns about IP theft and market access existed. However, characterizing all bilateral negotiations as uniformly one-sided ignores US concessions won in WTO and bilateral contexts, and conflates trade deficits (driven by macroeconomic factors) with negotiating failures. Sources: General knowledge: US-China trade history > it is hard for them to make a deal that benefits both countries **UNVERIFIABLE** Opinion statement about negotiating difficulty; not a falsifiable factual claim. Overall Veracity: 40% ## Tags - trade (90%) - china (90%) - spin-management (80%) - dealmaker-persona (80%) - ZTE (70%) - preemptive-framing (70%) - grandiosity-structural (50%) - redemption-arc (60%) - low-intensity (80%) ## That day _From trump.fm's machine-generated digest of the day, not his words._ **A Quiet Mother's Day Upstaged by an Impulsive China Concession** A low-volume Sunday saw just four posts, starting with a Mother's Day greeting and ending with foreign policy chest-thumping. The day's most consequential moment was Trump publicly announcing he was working with China's president to rescue ZTE, a telecom company his own Commerce Department had sanctioned for selling restricted technology to Iran and North Korea — a striking break from his "America First" brand. He quickly followed up with a softer post reframing China trade as a work-in-progress, then closed by relitigating last week's Iran Deal withdrawal. Notably absent was any mention of the deadly ISIS-claimed church bombings in Indonesia that killed 13 people. Full digest for 2018-05-13: https://trump.fm/date/2018-05-13/analysis ## Citation - APA: Trump, D. J. (2018, May 13). China and the United States are working well... [Social media post]. X (Twitter). trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/x_995746011321597953 - MLA: Trump, Donald J. "China and the United States are working well together on..." X (Twitter), 13 May. 2018. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/x_995746011321597953. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026. - Chicago: Donald J. Trump, "China and the United States are working well together on...," X (Twitter), May 13, 2018, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/x_995746011321597953. ## For agents - Site overview: https://trump.fm/llms.txt - API specification: https://trump.fm/openapi.json - MCP server: https://trump.fm/mcp (search and fetch tools, no auth) - This post as JSON: https://trump.fm/api/posts/x_995746011321597953 - Analysis as JSON: https://trump.fm/api/analysis/x_995746011321597953 - All citation formats: https://trump.fm/api/cite/x_995746011321597953 - Same day: https://trump.fm/date/2018-05-13 - The record alone, without the analysis: https://trump.fm/post/x_995746011321597953.md?analysis=false _Markdown view of a trump.fm page. Post, analysis, date, feed, contradictions, search and about pages answer in markdown at their URL with `.md` appended (`/index.md` for the home page), or when sent `Accept: text/markdown`._