Trump’s Denial of Defeat
President Donald Trump denies defeat at any cost and against all reason.
Just last week, The New York Times reported that Trump had dropped his demand for a $200 million payment from Harvard University. When it became clear that Trump had lost ground in his ongoing negotiation, he renewed his assault, posting in a flurry of late-night Truth Social posts demands for $1 billion from Harvard while claiming he “wants nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard”.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Nobody should have been surprised, because this about-face reflects one of the most fundamental impulses of Trump: a proclivity to deny failure through the art of preemptive rejection. In other words, “You don’t reject me; I reject you.” Or, “You can’t break up with me; I’m breaking up with you.”
In our book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, we reveal the ten pillars of power that define Trump’s strategic playbook. By exposing these predictable patterns, we show how he wields his favorite leadership tools. Preemptively denying his defeats is one of them.
Trump cannot tolerate the reality of others rejecting him. In his view, he must always be the one doing the rejecting. This compulsion to preemptively reject those who are rejecting him has been one of the most consistent through-lines of Trump’s career. The pattern is simple: when someone signals hesitation, criticism, or an impending departure, Trump moves to claim the outcome was his own decision—and often adds insults to reframe the other party as unworthy of his attention in the first place.
Thus, when Harvard signaled it was unwilling to take the less-expensive deal Trump offered, it was entirely predictable that Trump would seek to flip this rejection. Trump tried to spin the ordeal as him rejecting Harvard, rather than the other way around.
This saga is almost an exact parallel of many prior situations when Trump similarly spun breakups as his choice. For instance, when the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship in 2017 and decided not to attend the White House, Trump belatedly claimed that he had uninvited the team. “He was going to break up with us before we could break up with him,” quipped Warriors coach Steve Kerr.
Similarly, in 2017, when CEOs of the nation’s largest companies exited Trump’s business advisory councils in protest of his moral equivocation between the white supremacists and counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Trump similarly sought to frame the abject collapse of the councils as his decision, claiming he magnanimously chose to disband them.
And earlier this year, when Exxon CEO Darren Woods publicly professed disinterest in investing in Venezuela during a White House summit of oil company CEOs, Trump immediately sought to re-frame things. “I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response,” Trump claimed. “They’re playing too cute.”
This phenomenon of preemptive rejection is even more pronounced and exaggerated when it comes to staffers and subordinates trying to leave Trump’s employment. When the acting Social Security Administration Commissioner Michelle King resigned in early 2025, after refusing DOGE’s request to access sensitive government records, Trump sought to spin things again. When asked about King’s departure, Trump stated, “You know, when you fire somebody, they always resign, and then they say, ‘We resigned’. But when you have numbers like that, I think really it’s [you] got fired”. Trump insisted on framing King’s exit as a firing, even though she clearly resigned in protest and had spent 30 years working at the agency.
Similarly, in 2018, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis submitted a resignation letter critical of Trump’s Syria withdrawal. Trump rushed to announce that he was removing Mattis two months before his planned departure, criticizing his performance and saying that he had fired him. His own chief of staff disputed Trump’s accounting of the facts, but facts fall by the wayside in Trump’s compulsion to reframe every rejection as his choice.
And then there is perhaps Trump’s most egregious denial—his loss in the 2020 election. This denial is ongoing and the FBI recently seized official election ballots in Georgia. But it began before he even lost it in the first place. In Aug. 2020, Trump said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”
In this way, Trump takes the “sore loser” diagnosis to a grotesque but predictable plane. In Trump’s universe, he is never rejected—he is always the rejecter, never the rejected.
“Heads I win, tails, you lose” is a common catchphrase among mischievous children. It is also the apparent philosophy of the President of the United States.