TRUMP LEARNS GOVERNING IS MESSY

Canadian snowbirds arriving at West Palm Beach airport at a certain hour on recent Fridays have found themselves forced to kill a few extra minutes in the air as space is cleared for the arrival of Air Force One.

Donald Trump can be forgiven for his eagerness to get out of Washington for weekends at his Mar-a-Lago retreat.

Never a fan of the capital — or “swamp” as he called it — his early weeks as president have done little to endear him to the place. The “fine-tuned machine” he boasted of operating has been struggling for traction six weeks into his mandate.

After reportedly dressing down senior aides in the Oval Office, he was still so angry on arrival in Florida that he vented at a favoured golf partner who confessed “I haven’t seen him this angry.”

It’s a lesson to the businessman-president — and any would-be imitators — that running a country isn’t the snap it may seem.

Politics isn’t a business enterprise, and trying to make it operate along similar lines is infinitely easier said than done. Trump figured the task would be so simple he claimed to see no reason he couldn’t run the U.S. government and his real estate empire at the same time. It’s an opinion many corporate leaders have shared over the years. Only problem is that it doesn’t work. Here are some reasons why:

YOU CAN’T JUST ISSUE ORDERS

In the business world it’s easy: you prepare a plan, issue some orders, people do what their told, and things get done. Doesn’t work that way in government, where success depend on the compliance of a vast army of public officials, unionized workers, widely scattered bureaucracies, congressional powers, state governments and competing interests that may or may not be competent, motivated or equipped with the money or resources required.

Already Trump’s top people are sputtering about the “deep state,” the dark array of unfriendly forces they believe are working against them. That could include the FBI, the CIA, covert Obamaites, the courts, the majority of the media and any number of other interests immune to presidential invective.

YOU CAN’T JUST FIRE PEOPLE

Government is not a reality TV show. You can point at people all day and declare “You’re fired!” and yet there they are again the next morning.

There are too many of them, they have legal protections, and even identifying who’s responsible for a snafu is a challenge. Trump has the ability to dump aides, appointees, advisers and members of his cabinet, but is learning that — unlike episodes of The Apprentice — his ratings tend to go down rather than up when he utilizes the power. Losing Michael Flynn as national security adviser was a bad start for the administration; should Jeff Sessions be forced out as attorneygeneral it would reflect as much on Trump as on Sessions. A president who can’t find competent people looks weak, not strong.

THE PRESIDENT’S POWERS ARE LIMITED

Whatever Trump may have imagined, presidents lack dictatorial authority. Even a friendly Congress acts as a significant brake on the ability to get things done.

The current Congress, though controlled by Republicans, is sharply divided and feels no particular loyalty to a president who cast them all as grasping, self-interested nobodies.

Many fear that revoking Obamacare before a replacement is ready will leave them in the lurch when angry voters come calling. State governors who accepted federal money to implement the program don’t want to see it revoked. This isn’t going to be settled by issuing a few executive orders.

YOUR DECISIONS MATTER

If a real estate mogul decides to open a casino, runs it into bankruptcy and then clears out, no biggie: the only losers are a few hundred unfortunate employees, suppliers, and anyone foolish enough to have trusted him. But politics matters: if the president finds himself confronting a rogue near-nuclear state in North Korea and hopes to take effective action, foreign leaders who join him must have some assurance he’ll stay the course rather than change his mind and fire off a Saturday morning tweet calling them all a pack if losers and dunderheads.

FRIENDS WON’T STAY BOUGHT

Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who suggested archly that Trump had “small hands” during last year’s campaign, cadged a ride with Trump on Air Force One on Friday. The president may have figured that meant all hatchets had been buried.

But Rubio popped up on Sunday morning news shows, notably not defending Trump in the furor he’d created by accusing Obama of wiretapping him during the election.

“If it’s true, obviously we’re going to find out very quickly. And if it isn’t, then obviously he’ll have to explain what he meant by it,” Rubio said, adding that he doesn’t feel a special prosecutor is needed to investigate the claim “at this moment.”

Rubio can’t be fired, and he, like other GOP senators, has a vote Trump needs.

YOU CAN FIGHT THE PRESS, BUT YOU CAN’T WIN

Private companies can cloak their operations in secrecy, and public corporations employ extensive communications networks to massage and manage media coverage. For a president the challenge is much greater. Trump is correct that many mainstream media sites loathe him and crank out biased coverage, but even some Republican-friendly sources refuse to obediently toe every line. Some respected Fox pundits were just as astonished at Trump’s eruption against Obama as those at rival organizations, and Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has been a steady source of critical coverage.

While many Trump supporters enjoy his attacks on the media, the pundits will be there long after he’s gone and have a far bigger and more impressionable audience than his handful of spokespeople.

Fairly or not, they are a powerful influence, and Trump’s outbursts only emphasize his inability to deal with a critical part of any president’s job, feeding the impression of a weak and flailing White House.

IT DOESN’T PAY

“Success” in business is straightforward — a rising stock price is often enough. And even spectacularly ineffective CEOs can often expect a generous golden handshake in return for going away, easing them into a comfortable retirement while successors clean up the mess. Political pay is lousy and the outcome more complex: George W. Bush may consider himself a success, but you’d have a hard time raising a quorum on that.

History has the final say, and can take a generation or three to make up its mind — Harry S. Truman was long in the grave before historians begrudgingly concluded he might not have been so bad after all. Ronald Reagan gets more popular the longer he’s dead. The best an ex-president can do is write some memoirs defending past decisions and hope someone reads them. But they often don’t.