Six ways The Donald is failing

Continued from FP1

But hang on: Wasn’t the Donald supposed to be this century’s Great Communicator? Wasn’t his surprise victory last year a testament to his powers of persuasion? Well, maybe fourth-grade diction and base emotional appeals helped him get to the White House. But his administration is in the throes of a crisis, and that’s the crucible in which communication skills are tested. And he’s failing.

How? First, and most obviously, he lacks discipline. The early-morning tweets and the ex tempore TV interviews, which often contradict official messages out of his own White House, used to be interesting, but now they’re just destructive. They no longer suggest a maverick unafraid to buck the rules: they suggest a man who doesn’t know what the rules are.

Second, Trump seems to think publicity is success. It’s not. His campaign strategy of dominating the media agenda through controversial statements may have worked to generate awareness among otherwise unengaged voters. Now everyone already knows who the president is, so what’s the point?

But there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? Wrong. Awareness isn’t approval — as demonstrated by Trump’s approval numbers, which are plumbing historic lows for a presidency this young.

Third, Trump has been unable to adapt his personal brand to the presidency. He’s a celebrity, and he treats celebrity as if it were a virtue. Unlike Reagan, who managed to shrug off his B-movie past with self-deprecating humour, the current Great Communicator seems to take his fame dead seriously, even to the point of fabulism. Imagine Reagan boasting that Bedtime for Bonzo was the greatest box office hit of all time, and you can see the difference between the two.

Fourth, the President doesn’t take ownership. He has had a total of one solo press conference since he took office. Instead, he trundles out staff to answer to even the biggest issues and/or crises. Meanwhile, he hides from real interaction by appearing on friendly news programs or spouting on Twitter, which he uses almost exclusively as a oneway communications platform.

By the way, his nearly 30 million followers on Twitter comprise a fraction of Barack Obama’s (88 million) or Katy Perry’s (98 million). Trump is no master of social media; he simply uses it to issue statements he knows will get repeated in the mainstream media. Increasingly, that looks like evasion.

Fifth, he doesn’t show that he gets it. In the face of serious accusations, the strategy is deny, deny, deny. Take the Flynn scandal: Trump could have said he takes the allegations seriously and thrown in some bromides about keeping America safe. But he didn’t. Which only lent credence to the allegations.

Sixth, Trump isn’t demonstrating that he can fix his problems, in part because he isn’t effectively handling his staff. He seems to command little loyalty from them — the White House is leakier than the Titanic. Yet while he reportedly has threatened a big shakeup, he hasn’t pulled the trigger. (He only reluctantly let Flynn go, by all accounts.) It might sound cruel, but when something serious is wrong, somebody has to lose their job, if only to communicate that the problem is getting fixed. That somebody can’t be the boss. Given his Apprentice experience, Trump should have figured that out already.

I could go on. Maybe Trump will right the ship and markets will get their long-awaited tax cuts. But for now, he’s committing errors that have applied to many a political or corporate leader who screws things up big-time.

If you see any of them from the folks running companies you own, be careful.

As investors, we discount the “soft” elements of corporate leadership — how CEOs talk, treat people, and so on — at our peril.

They might not show up on a balance sheet, but they can be huge factors in the fate of any organization: we should pay attention not only to the results leaders promise, but also how they communicate those promises and their “personal brand,” if for no other reason than to help judge whether they will be able to deliver.