What more can be said about a man who’s been a public figure for nearly 40 years? I’m minded to write this piece because there’s a pretty obvious flaw in Donald Trump that the press and the public have not picked up on. Sure he’s been sued several thousand times as a businessman because he’s an awful payer, he’s admitted to molesting women, he’s made fun of the disabled and is proud of not paying taxes, he’s cheated on his wife and lied in office several times a day but there’s much more to him than that. In some ways, the really obvious failings in his character and behaviour have created outrage and criticism fatigue meaning a few important things go unseen. I’m here to give you an extra perspective on what a thoroughly awful leader he is and why he should not be put in charge of anything, except perhaps an end-timer religious cult.
Donald Trump makes sense as a really small-time middle manager in a family firm, or what Americans call a mom-and-pop operation. He’s a hugely petty, egotistical man who overreacts to minor details, and lacks the vision and foresight that would elevate him even to the position of regional manager in a mildly successful landscaping equipment hire firm straddling a few states across the Mountain West. Trump is unique as a President in having no prior political or military experience, that shouldn’t disbar you from holding high office, but the thing so many Republicans cited, ‘He’s a businessman’, conferred a status on him wholly unwarranted. In the US there are firms that are great at surviving – Ford, GM – there are firms that are great at world domination – Coca Cola, Heinz – there are firms that are great at innovation – IBM, DuPont – and there are firms that are great at marketing – Apple, HBO. Trump’s corporation has none of those attributes, indeed it’s been calculated if he just left his inheritance in the bank or let a fund manager handle it he’d actually be richer than he is now – i.e. from a financial perspective his business career has been a complete waste of time.
Taking over from his dad at a young age means Donald has spent his adult life as the boss, and that tends to lead to bad habits. You surround yourself with yes-men, don’t pick up tips from others and have an almost complete lack of self-reflection. Trump is CEO of The Trump Organisation but is no ordinary CEO. My limited experience of working inside FTSE top 100 companies showed me that CEOs work pretty long hours but spend none of that time interacting with the entry level or mid level staff. They don’t sweat the small stuff, they don’t talk to the little people. Only fellow directors or very senior managers know what CEOs actually do, but business experts will tell you what those at the top of a business or political organisation OUGHT to be doing. That is: making executive decisions. In the company I used to work for, there was a constant churn of individual brands, so executive decisions amounted to buying and selling. This generally involved selling magazines (people don’t want to pay for the written word any more), and buying exhibitions (people will still pay for a profitable real world experience).
Being a good CEO essentially means making a small number of executive decisions and carrying them out as well as you possibly can. In order to focus on those executive decisions you also need to hire excellent staff and let them get on with their jobs because if you get caught up in middling or small stuff it will take away from the bigger picture tasks that only you can carry out. (Note that Trump didn’t hire excellent people and let them get on with the job, his Presidency involved constant chaos and a high turnover of staff)
Inability to focus on executive decisions is what makes Trump so extraordinarily bad. So Trump was not the first President in the age of social media, at a stretch you could argue George W. Bush was in office right when that started, however Trump is the first to use social media compulsively and apply his childish, brattish personality to it. So Trump got caught up in a 1000 or more twitter exchanges during his time in office, sometimes in the middle of the night. Spewing out pointless, attention-seeking messages, wasting time and energy, often about things that are beyond the remit of a President. Life is, to an extent, a zero-sum game. The more time you spend on the pointless inconsequential stuff, the less able you are to optimise your decision making about the complicated, difficult, strategic and the long term. Small wonder then, that anything Trump proposed while campaigning that would take a lot of time and a lot of money never happened – the border wall, significant improvements to transport infrastructure or a workable reform of Affordable Care (Obamacare). He didn’t have the attention span, the tenacity or the patience to see any of these things through, because he’s small time and outside of his family firm he wouldn’t have got very far at a meritocratic firm like HP or General Electric, thousands would be promoted ahead of him.
As a Brit, looking in from the outside at American politics maybe there’s some nuance I’m missing, but to allow yourself to be distracted by small details at the top of the American hierarchy seems totally crazy. It’s a big country, having a control freak micro-manage EVERYTHING is impossible, and that’s why the US has a federal system of government. In the UK, with our centralised system it’s okay if a Prime Minister answers a question in Parliament about a RAF base or an A road by-pass, he/she is not treading on the toes of a state governor. While right wing Americans love small government, most of their government doesn’t even happen in Washington, even more reason not to get involved in the small stuff if you’re head of the Federal Government.
Trump doesn’t know what a good CEO is because he’s never been told, his job fell into his lap. Trump doesn’t know what a good President does because he doesn’t listen to Republicans who know what they’re talking about. At the age of 76 it’s a little bit late for Trump to learn. We can only hope that Trump loses bigly in 2024 and he can go back to having robust conversations with Janey Godley on his golf course.
returnoftheliberal 