Donald Trump wants to run the government as a business. But hes never been any good at that either.

[CousinIT]

... No matter how well Trump manages to keep up the sales spiel, the fact is that he is the president and it’s a bigger job than pitching steaks and cheap perfume. Since he allegedly ran a billion-dollar empire, he was supposed to be a high-powered executive with supernatural management talents. As Al Jazeera and many other news organizations reported throughout the campaign, for many of his followers that was the biggest attraction. For instance, this quote in USA Today is entirely typical of the Trump voter:

“He knows how to run a business, he knows how economies should work and he knows how to hire the right people to get the job done instead of thinking he knows best on everything. He speaks his mind, he doesn’t bow to political correctness and he’s honest.”

Well, he does speak his mind.

Trump played a successful entrepreneur on his reality show for many years and that’s been a big part of his image. But it’s also true that Republicans have extolled the virtues of the businessman as leader for many years, often making the point that the government should be run like a business because it would be more efficient. But that’s faith-based market worship, not reality. Government is not a business and while some of the lessons one might learn in business could be applicable to running the government, the duties of government, especially at the highest level, are much more complex than even the largest industries. The problems, the mission and the constituencies are so different that the skills required for the job have much more to do with general temperament and intelligence than executive experience.

This doesn’t mean business experience is of no value. It does mean that that a business executive can’t run the country the same way he or she ran a business. It’s a different organizational structure altogether.

Donald Trump is actually running the country like his business. He appears to believe that he’s the CEO of America and everyone in the government answers to him. This is why his administration doesn’t think twice about enlisting the FBI and members of the congressional intelligence committees to do damage control, or about insulting the independent judiciary and the press when they fail to do his bidding. (Did Trump even know the president can’t fire federal judges?) Trump appears to think that being president means he’s everyone’s boss.

But that doesn’t explain the White House chaos of these first weeks, with all the leaks and missteps and infighting. Even though the government isn’t a business and the president’s job is very different than a corporate executive’s, if Trump were actually a skilled executive, as he so often claims, he should at least be able to manage the White House staff.

This article in Politico by Michael Kruse sheds light on that issue: Donald Trump isn’t just making the mistake of trying to run the government like a business, Donald Trump is also a terrible businessman. According to Bruce Nobles, who was president of the defunct Trump Shuttle airline in the 1980s, Trump is a “performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/01/donald-trump-wants-to-run-the-government-as-a-business-but-hes-never-been-any-good-at-that-either/#.WLbLbtXxvBk.twitter

[shenmue]

1. He really is a skunk