Recap: Chris Voss on Trump, Empathy, and the Real Secret of Negotiation

The former FBI negotiator on why empathy is leverage, compromise is mediocrity, and leadership is daily negotiation.

This week’s New York Times Magazine interview with Chris Voss, the former FBI hostage negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference, caught my attention. Voss is always worth reading, not because of the celebrity halo around negotiation, but because he consistently reframes power as something subtler than most leaders think.

The headline takeaway? Voss argues that Donald Trump’s “secret weapon” as a negotiator is not bluster, leverage, or threat. It’s empathy. Not empathy as sentimentality, but as Voss defines it: tactical empathy, the disciplined skill of demonstrating that you understand how the other side sees the world.

Three points stood out to me:

1. Empathy is not agreement. Voss is clear: to show empathy is not to take the other side’s position, but to articulate it so clearly that they feel understood. That act disarms hostility and opens up the possibility of movement.

2. Conflict avoidance is the real problem. Two out of three people, Voss notes, are afraid of conflict. They confuse negotiation with confrontation. Yet his success shows the opposite: people want collaboration, but they don’t know the way in.

3. Compromise is mediocrity. Voss doesn’t buy the win-win mythology. Compromise guarantees mediocrity, watering down both visions until nothing bold remains. Leaders often fall into this trap, mistaking consensus for resolution.

Voss’ assessment of Trump is striking. On social media, Trump looks like a blunt instrument. But face-to-face, Voss sees evidence of emotional intelligence that doesn’t translate in the press. Deals with Trudeau, Zelensky, and even Middle East leaders, Voss argues, reflect Trump’s instinct for empathy as situational awareness.

You don’t have to like Trump to see the lesson: perception in public can be very different from presence in the room. In institutional life, we underestimate how much trust and movement happen only in the direct, human encounter.

Negotiation, as Voss frames it, is not a one-off tactic. It’s the daily discipline of leadership. Every budget cycle, every IT strategy meeting, every conversation with faculty or staff: these are negotiations. And the leaders who make progress aren’t the loudest or the most forceful. They are the ones who can sit across the table and name the fears, constraints, and pressures on the other side.

This is the paradox: what feels like giving up control is actually how you gain it. Voss puts it plainly: “the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.”

Empathy, stripped of sentimentality, is not weakness. It’s leverage. It builds the credibility cycle, it steadies the room, and it allows you to navigate complexity without defaulting to lowest-common-denominator compromise.

That’s as true in the Oval Office as it is in the provost’s office.