Nikki Haley used Trump's mercurial personality to get concessions at the UN

Ed Morrissey:

Chalk another one up for the Madman Theory. Outgoing UN ambassador Nikki Haley told NBC’s Today that she and Donald Trump used his bombastic nature strategically in order to get what both wanted in international diplomacy. “I was trying to get the job done,” Haley says, in part by having Trump frighten her colleagues and especially our adversaries....
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“He would ratchet up the rhetoric, and then I’d go back to the ambassadors and say: ‘You know, he’s pretty upset. I can’t promise you what he’s going to do or not, but I can tell you if we do these sanctions, it will keep him from going too far,'” Haley said in an exclusive interview which aired Wednesday morning.

“I know all of it,” she said in response to a question about the president’s bombastic, sometimes false statements in public and on Twitter. “But I’m disciplined enough to know not to get into the drama.”

At the United Nations, “I was trying to get the job done,” she said. “And I got the job done by being truthful, but also by letting him be unpredictable and not showing our cards.”

Haley’s interviewer interjects, “So you were playing good cop, bad cop?” At best that’s a clarifying question. Not only was that strategy rather obvious over the last couple of years, it was so obvious that it’s tough to tell just how effective it might have been. Richard Nixon used a similar strategy (at times) when it was called the Madman Theory, using an impression of impulsiveness bordering on mania that made everyone default to their instincts to appease. (Not everyone was a fan of that strategy, then or now.)

One can even cast it more simply as Trump’s Art of the Deal as applied to diplomacy. Make the other person think they won by containing Trump’s initial demands or his initial instincts when all Trump wanted was the concessions he ended up getting. That may not be the safest way to negotiate in an environment where actual madmen exist, but it was effective for Nixon at times, and Haley is arguing it was effective for Trump as well. Maybe so, but the extent to which this was an obvious strategy would tend to nullify it.
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This rings true to me.  While his critics think he is crazy there is a certain method to his "madness."  He strikes me as probably a difficult person for some people to work for, but smart people like Haley know how to use it to get things accomplished.

Sometimes you just have to know how to communicate better with "difficult" bosses. 

I recall one who was an aggressive salesman type who sometimes wanted to push the envelop to get a deal done.  I never made the mistake of telling he couldn't do it,  I just told him if he did it he would be giving a "put" with every security he sold.  That got his attention. 

He quickly realized that by doing so the buyer would get the benefit of all the upside, and if there was a downside to the trade he would have to cover it.  Putting the issue in the context of the securities options market made the point in a way he could understand.