‘Trump is inept and disgraces the American experiment’
THIS IS hard to write as it makes me perpetually look bad that I worked for him and supported him. Donald Trump is a disgrace to the American experiment. His inept leadership has driven our society to the brink of disaster – a combination of the Great Depression, Spanish flu and the Civil Rights movement.
What has caused us to arrive at this dangerous moment? A combination of Trump’s amorality, weak management and nativist instincts.
But he can only outrun the truth for so long, and the walls are caving in.
Trump’s character and impetuous decision-making are born out of two things: 1) a deep-seated insecurity resulting from his father’s disapproval, and 2) the mentorship of one America’s great scoundrels, his former lawyer Roy Cohn.
“I alone can fix it,” Trump proclaimed at the Republican nominating convention, lifting the lid on the narcissism that would define his presidency.
He has governed with a complete lack of trust in those around him, which is why his administration has been a revolving door of personnel. He doesn’t listen and, above all, he wants the credit when something goes right – as if he is still seeking approval from his long-dead father.
The only thing that appears to soothe his insecurity is attempting to soil the reputations of great, accomplished men such as Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Barack Obama and John Mccain.
Cohn taught Trump the playbook on how to bully your way through life.
Control the news cycle. When challenged, distract and deflect. Bluff, delay and evade. Never apologise or show remorse. Have no shame.
If there is no depth to which you won’t stoop, you have an inherent advantage over your virtuous adversaries.
Cohn was a lawyer who hated lawyers.a Jewish man who was openly anti-semitic. In the world of Cohn and Trump, fear reigns supreme.
The most belligerent, not the most prepared, will always prevail. In terms of leadership style,trump manages by chaos.
Historically, there are two effective models for operating the executive branch of the US government: 1) a bottom-up Cabinet model and 2) a top-down White
House model. In a Cabinet model, which was used by Reagan, the President distributes power among strong cabinet officials and allows policy to filter through to the White House. In a White House model, used by Clinton, the West Wing sets policy and tasks cabinet officials with implementing it.
Trump doesn’t use either model. He uses a chaos model.
The typical connective tissue that exists between government departments has frayed, leading to a lack of communication and inability to solve problems.
The reason I never believed in the Russian collusion story is that his staff can’t even collude with themselves.
In well-run organisations a manager typically only has five or six direct reports. Everything else has to scale away or you lose the ability to hold people accountable.
Trump has no reports, thus he has every report.
People in his administration are constantly jockeying for influence, which leads to confusion and poor results.
Exhibit A: The pandemic response, which saw the official White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vicepresident Mike Pence, working parallel to the ad hoc shadow task force of Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser – and son-in-law.
The result was chaos and tragedy – an inability to procure personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical workers, the failure to rapidly organise mass virus testing and haphazard communication about how to safely reopen the economy. Now we have 100,000 Americans dead and the deepest recession in more than 100 years, with no cohesive plan on how to move forward.
Trump does have a worldview. Culturally, he is a nativist in the mould of last-century figures such as Joseph P Kennedy – father of John F and Robert – Right-wing populist Father Coughlin, air ace national hero Charles Lindbergh and Southern politicians Huey Long and George Wallace.
He finds ways seemingly to wink at racism, like saying there were “good people on both sides” at the 2017 neo-nazi rally in Charlottesville, refusing to denounce the Confederate flag and, more recently, celebrating motor mogul Henry Ford, a noted eugenicist, for his “good bloodlines”.
Economically, he is a protectionist. He wants to take the world back to 1890 where America produced everything it needed inside its own borders.
BRITISH political economist David Ricardo, an early 19th-century champion of global trade, explained that a wealthy nation cannot produce everything it needs at the best price; it must go outside its borders to do that. In doing so, a wealthy nation would also improve the fortunes of its trading partners, which is in the national interest.
Today, the United States could likely reconfigure much of its economy to produce everything at home – but that would come at great cost not just to consumer purchasing power, but also to global peace and stability.
Post-second World War globalism, led by the US, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and created the longest-lasting peace in modern history. If we abandon that principle, we will push the world into 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, where life is “poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
The arc of Roy Cohn’s story – he was disbarred as a lawyer after attempting to defraud a dying client – also taught us that you can only run for so long.
In the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has finally found a force of nature that was impervious to his propaganda.
‘He is a protectionist, he wants to take the world back to 1890’