As I continue to follow, at some distance, the carnival sideshow
parade of the Trump presidency, my perplex over the president's managerial
style deepens. How could he possibly have run a multinational conglomerate the
way he runs the White House? Anybody who has ever managed anything knows you
don't contradict and humiliate your staff in public, you don't undercut their
authority, you don't criticize and threaten to fire them openly -- in short,
you don't wash your own dirty linen in full view of the very people you're
trying to serve. Yet that is precisely how Donald Trump is behaving. Which
causes me to wonder: How did this genius of the deal become so successful while being so hapless?
I might as well say it: Jack
Kennedy was an incompetent president. If he had not been murdered when he was,
his presidency would have dissolved in scandals that would have made Watergate
look like a junior prom. Yet he had a personal style that was charming,
dignified, and reassuring. Richard Nixon was competent, but his personality was so flawed that his abilites made no difference to his fate. Barack Obama was certainly incompetent, but at least
he was amiable. Donald Trump is proving himself to be massively incompetent,
without even the saving grace of an amenable personal style. He comes across as
abrasive, arbitrary, and disrespectful even of his own closest advisers. As I
have remarked before, more so than any recent president, his legacy will depend
on what he is seen as having accomplished. And so far, he has accomplished
precious little. His miserable failure to replace the disaster that is
Obamacare was due largely, as far as I can tell, to his inability to deal even
with members of his own ruling party. On this pivotal constitutional issue (and
I see it as a constitutional and not a healthcare issue), he has managed to
alienate just about everyone.
And talk about messaging! He
continues to send out a steady stream of inconsistent, mixed, contradictory,
and tendentious tweets that make it virtually impossible either to take him
seriously as a chief executive or to discern what his core beliefs and policies
may be. This is not only annoying; given the current internal and foreign
climate, it is downright dangerous. And yet he will not stop; he seems incapable
of learning and of changing his behavior, which are two essential assets in a leader. Lincoln was cautious, careful in his judgments, but he
lived by the principle: "I will adopt new views as quickly as they are
proved to be true views." Trump appears not only unable to adopt new
views, but even to recognize them.
So far, he has stumbled through
his presidency like a non-drinking alcoholic, unable to get out of his own
fumbling way. And now he moves on to tax reform. Every president in my lifetime
has attempted to fix the baroque, unfair, and irrational tax system in this
country, and all have failed. So what makes Trump, or anyone else for that
matter, think that he will succeed where his predecessors have not? It appears
that he now believes that he can co-opt the Democrats into providing him with
the majority which the voters gave him and which he has managed to squander
away. That, to my mind, is a degree of naïveté of which this non-political president is perhaps uniquely capable. Does he really imagine, even in his wildest dreams, that the Democrats are going to help him establish a legacy of success,
and in the process, contribute to his re-election chances? Schumer and Pelosi, those evil
twins of rabid partisanship, as partners, as collegial comrades? What kind of fatuous fantasy is that?
Who is talking to Trump? Who is advising him? Why, the people around him must be as incompetent as he, since they clearly cannot persuade him to act even in his own self-interest. Next he will be trying to coax The New York Times and NBC on board his train to oblivion. And they will be only too happy to oblige, so that they can push the throttle to demolition speed. The Democrats are not going to let Trump have his tax reform, since that would serve only to enhance his prospects in the midterms and 2020. On the contrary, I fully expect that if they do pretend to collaborate with him, it will be only to sabotage any hope we may have of getting meaningful tax reform in this decade.
Who is talking to Trump? Who is advising him? Why, the people around him must be as incompetent as he, since they clearly cannot persuade him to act even in his own self-interest. Next he will be trying to coax The New York Times and NBC on board his train to oblivion. And they will be only too happy to oblige, so that they can push the throttle to demolition speed. The Democrats are not going to let Trump have his tax reform, since that would serve only to enhance his prospects in the midterms and 2020. On the contrary, I fully expect that if they do pretend to collaborate with him, it will be only to sabotage any hope we may have of getting meaningful tax reform in this decade.
Much as I hate to agree with
the mainstream media, which no longer even affects the pretense of objectivity,
the sooner Donald Trump goes, the better for all of us. And that he will be
gone before his term is up I think is clear to anyone who is paying attention,
not to the media, but to the Great Deal-maker himself, as he systematically negotiates the terms of his own demise.
