We’ve learned this week that Trump doesn’t always get what he wants. His recent negotiation with Fox News was a huge failure. Photograph by Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Donald J. Trump is the greatest negotiator in history, according to Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly called his book “The Art of the Deal” the second-greatest of all time, behind the Bible. Trump would probably point out, too, that you’d be better off reading his book than reading His book if you’re trying to win a negotiation.

Still, we’ve learned this week that Trump doesn’t always get what he wants. Measured against his short-term goals, his negotiation with Fox News has been a huge failure. Recall that Trump has been fighting with the cable channel since last August, when Megyn Kelly, the network’s star anchor, asked him a tough question during the first G.O.P. debate. Soon after, Trump began mocking and insulting Kelly and any other Fox host or pundit who treated his campaign with skepticism. Kelly was probably menstruating, according to Trump. George Will seems smart only because he wears glasses.

As Thursday night’s debate on Fox News approached, Trump had a goal: to get Kelly removed from her duties as a moderator. Fox, to its credit, refused to allow a candidate to pick which journalists get to ask him questions. In the ensuing battle of spin and counter-spin, some behind-the-scenes details of Trump’s negotiating tactics spilled into public view.

On Tuesday, Fox issued a press release that included this astonishing passage:

Capitulating to politicians’ ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one leveled by Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly.

In a call on Saturday with a FOX News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a ‘rough couple of days after that last debate’ and he ‘would hate to have her go through that again.’ Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so. We can’t give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees.

Trump is still welcome at Thursday night’s debate and will be treated fairly, just as he has been during his 132 appearances on FOX News & FOX Business, but he can’t dictate the moderators or the questions.

Lewandowski’s alleged threat against Kelly sounded more “Goodfellas” than “Art of the Deal.” (Nice anchor you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to her.) But it shouldn’t be too surprising, given that the Trump campaign confines reporters at his rallies to metal pens and that one of his lawyers told a reporter for the Daily Beast, last year, that if the publication ran a story about an allegation that Trump once raped his first wife, “What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.”

The Trump campaign appears to be challenging Ailes’s dominance of conservative media with similar tactics, but the head of Fox refused to cave.

Round one: Fox News.

In response to this initial defeat, Trump pulled out of Thursday’s debate and announced that he would hold an event elsewhere in Des Moines, to honor veterans, at the same time as the debate. Put aside the unseemliness of a billionaire politician trying to deflect criticism by collecting checks for an unimpeachable cause. (Trump’s announcement prompted the founder of one group, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, to tweet that it wouldn’t accept money from the event, because it didn’t want “to be used for political stunts.”) Also put aside, for a moment, the fact that donations from the event would actually go to Trump’s foundation rather than directly to other charities. (Trump says that the money will later be distributed to a list of veterans’ groups that he has made public. I.A.V.A. was not included on the list.) The underlying story of the rally was that Trump wanted to distract attention from the fact that he had faced down Ailes and lost.

Yesterday, Trump, perhaps realizing that he had made a mistake, made an attempt to get back into the debate. Having lost the battle over Kelly, he shifted to a new demand. “Trump offered to appear at the debate upon the condition that Fox News contribute $5 million to his charities,” the network said in a statement. “We explained that was not possible and we could not engage in a quid pro quo, nor could any money change hands for any reason.”

Though it was lost amid all the dust kicked up by Trump and his competing event, Fox was celebrating what was clearly a victory. “In the last 48 hours, we’ve kept two issues at the forefront,” the statement said. “We would never compromise our journalistic standards and we would always stand by our journalist, Megyn Kelly. We have accomplished those two goals and we are pleased with the outcome.”

Round two: Fox News.

Whether and how these developments will affect the Iowa caucuses is unclear. Trump may not be as great a negotiator as he proclaims, but he is undeniably a terrific marketer, with an impressive ability to spin defeats into victories. Any other candidate would have been pilloried for doing what he did—you can imagine the consequences if Hillary Clinton tried to skip a Democratic debate because she objected to Anderson Cooper’s presence, then announced that she would host a charity event instead and use the Clinton Foundation to collect the money.

As for Trump? We’ll start to find out on Monday. As he wrote in “The Art of the Deal,” “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”