Can Trump keep those hands off the details?
IT has proved one of Donald Trump’s greatest strengths in building a worldwide luxury brand: an obsessive attention to detail, down to the curtains hanging in hotel rooms and the marble lining the lobby floor. As president, it may prove one of his major liabilities, presidential historians warn.
Interviews with people familiar with how Trump conducts business reveal the president-elect as a micromanager who regularly spars over details about decor in projects across his property and branding empire.
“I’m very much involved in the details,” Trump said during a June deposition in a lawsuit stemming from his development of a Washington hotel. “I was involved in the design of the building and the room sizes and the entrances and the lobby and the marble and the bathrooms and the fixtures and the bars and a lot of things.”
Trump announced this week that he would leave his businesses “in total” so that he could focus on the presidency.
But those who have worked with him say a lifetime habit of micromanaging may be difficult to break, providing ammunition for critics who say his decisions as president will be driven by his private interests.
A former employee of the Trump Organisation who has worked closely with Trump was sceptical that he could leave behind his beloved company after spending decades building it up: “I can’t picture him stepping aside for the presidency.”
Even if he does make a clean break, Trump will have to guard against getting bogged down in the bureaucratic minutiae inherent in the office.
He should avoid the example of former president Jimmy Carter, another famous micromanager, who spent his first months in office poring over the White House tennis court schedule, said Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.
Micromanagers rarely make successful presidents, said Rick Ghere, an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton in Ohio. To be effective, presidents must delegate authority to members of their cabinet and rely on a range of expertise, he said. “Being a decision-maker in a high-level public position is a lot different than being a CEO.”
Trump has said he will turn the Trump Organisation over to three of his adult children.
Three sources who worked on the presidential campaign said Trump made almost all the decisions on spending, strategy and messaging.
According to the sources, senior campaign officials were desperate to get aboard the candidate’s plane early on in the presidential race, fearful that if they were left behind he would change course on strategy and they would be shut out.
Micromanaging is not necessarily a recipe for disaster — presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Carter and Barack Obama gained reputations as micromanagers, said Nancy Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the history of leadership in the US.
But Koehn said a micromanager with a lack of any government experience was a potentially toxic combination.
“I think it is highly likely that diving into areas in which he has very little experience without an extraordinary cast of experts around him will result in poor policy decisions, which will have large unintended consequences,” she said. —