ANYBODY who has experience in running a business will tell you about a type of person you meet who is adept at leading others without sharing any of the material, tangible benefits of the journey. In America they had a word to describe such a person. They called him or her a ‘hustler’.
A hustler has a way of operating that pulls others along to follow them without sharing any of the tangible rewards from the journey. Here is how to tell if you are being hustled. Do they loudly and conspicuously validate your ideas about your own self? Do they pepper your professional dealings with these words of validation? Do they join in with relish when you bad mouth your adversaries, maybe even making a public display out of it? Do they promise large rewards in the future against cooperation today? Do they nudge you into making concrete contributions to their enterprise, whether monetary or otherwise, against these promises of a large pay-off in the future?
You’ll know you are being hustled when you are required to make concrete contributions — whether of time, money, or reputation — to a project the hustler wants you to join, but consistently fail to obtain any returns beyond performative gestures or promises of a future pay-off and somehow you feel good and validated doing it. The validation is the lubricant that makes the extraction of your time, money, reputation or other resource feel like a privilege rather than a loss. In a business context, this is often achieved through high-status proximity, symbolic titles, or the sense of being part of an ‘exclusive’ inner circle. When the validation is the only thing being delivered, you are being hustled.
Arguably, the most famous hustler of modern times is Donald Trump. Read the first biography written about him to get a good idea of this. The book is called Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth and was published in 1992. The book itself doesn’t use the word ‘hustler’ for Trump, preferring descriptors like “wheeler-dealer”, “showman” and “promoter” instead. But the modus operandi from Trump’s early years as a real estate developer in New York City from the 1970s and 1980s that it describes is classic hustler behaviour.
Are we really being courted as an ally, a partner or a friend by the Trump White House?
Two things stand out in this telling of the tale. One, Trump is a master at manipulating perceptions, and second, he mobilises people for his purposes then reneges on his side of the bargain once he has achieved his purpose. The book provides a long list of these behaviours.
Those who were hustled by him in the past did not know what his true purpose really was until it was too late. They were either left on the losing side of a ‘partnership’, like New York City was with the Grand Hyatt opening or the construction of Trump Towers, or were stiffed altogether, or had to sue for collection of their dues. They were all hustled into becoming part of an enterprise that they didn’t fully understand, against promises of a future pay-off that weren’t ever really going to be fulfilled, and dumped on the wayside once they were no longer needed or once they had realised that their role in his scheme was not what they had been told it was going to be. Trump befriended people easily. He turned on them even more easily.
This is important to bear in mind today because the hustler has gone global. His dealings with Pakistan, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, Rwanda, Taiwan and even Ukraine look suspiciously like a hustle because in each case you can see tangible, material contributions made by the partners in return for assurances, photo-ops, statements and other non-tangible benefits. The real nature of the hustle is often buried in the details, like it was with the Grand Hyatt whose agreement was signed in 1976. The fine print, however, allowed him to benefit by as much $60 million according to the City of New York. Arrangements of this sort are now being made between the US and countries around the world.
Across the globe, these arrangements function as a grand-scale hustle. This holds from Ukraine surrendering half its future reconstruction profits for the performative armour of a promised security guarantee, to Egypt trading vital sovereign leverage over the Suez for a subscription to a symbolic ‘Board of Peace’. Even in the Congo and Rwanda, the pattern holds as critical mineral wealth is structurally redirected to American supply chains in exchange for the fleeting validation of a White House-brokered ‘stabilisation’. In each instance, the participants are hustled into making a massive, tangible contribution to Trump’s scheme while being fed the feel-good high of international status and a promise of future protection.
When dealing with a hustler one rule should be followed rigorously: know yourself. You must know exactly what you want out of the relationship, and more importantly, out of the specific bargain you are being hustled into. You should know this in tangible terms, dollars and cents, not intangible deliverables like photo-ops, statements or promises of a future pay-off. If the pay-off is in the future, there should be a strict timeline, with clear deliverables from both sides as to the requirements to be fulfilled to trigger the release of the next tranche. If the tangible deliverables are not structured clearly up front, the hustler wins by pulling you down the slope towards his own purpose, while keeping you entertained with words of validation.
For months now, we in Pakistan have been showered with words of validation and a stream of photo-ops coming from the White House. But the time has come to tally up the tangible benefits and balance these out with the tangible commitments given in return. Are we really being courted as an ally, a partner or a friend by the Trump White House? Or are we being hustled? The question is critically important and should be answered without emotion.
The writer is a business and economy journalist.
Published in Dawn, February 5th, 2026
