Check your criteria
And another thing. What’s this crap about how Trump has “continually set the standards of business and entrepreneurial excellence, especially with his interests in real estate, sports, and entertainment”? Nonsense.
We don’t think of “entrepreneurial excellence” that way (assuming we think of it at all, but that’s another subject). We think of it in connection with some kind of innovation or improvement, of a kind that benefits a lot of people (or the planet or the environment and the like). Fast food, for instance – however crappy the food is, it’s still been a benefit in convenience and cheapness for a lot of people.
We don’t think of building luxury apartment buildings as “entrepreneurial excellence,” nor do we think of building casinos and golf courses that way. We don’t think of toys for rich people as a benefit for the masses.
Trump has made himself very rich, yes, but that’s not “excellence.” It’s especially not in his case, given how much cheating and stealing took place on the way.
Also putting what reads like heavy-handed advertising copy on the official White House website is toe-curlingly tacky.
Makes the traditional Velvet Elvis look tasteful and elegant in comparison.
Who the hell told him that scowl was a good look? I know, probably nobody. He would have decided that himself.
Why not have heavy-handed advertising copy? He clearly regards the presidency as just another “Trump enterprises” and if you (and I) think differently, it’s because we’re losers, right?
I think it was the people who did The Apprentice who told him the scowl was a good look? Or maybe the audience for it?
So wrong. So very wrong.
It’s more important to look the part, or the idea of the part, than to have the ability to fulfil the actual job. Same thinking beside that ridiculous “Here I am, writing my speech” photo. It’s someone’s IDEA of what speech writing LOOKS like, rather than a candid shot of him actually writing a speech. Mind boggling.
Well they couldn’t very well do a candid shot of him actually writing a speech…
Stop selling, dude. You already got the job.
I suspect he thinks the scowl, along with the ‘squinting into the sunset’ thing he uses for his twitter avatar, both make him look rugged and tough.
I suspect so too, but oh my god he’s so wrong.
There is a deeper problem at work here, I think. One that cannot be simply reduced to: “Is Donald Trump a legitimate, and legitimately successful, businessman?” The question is rather “Do we want businesspeople in charge of our governments?”
The current (well, ‘current’ as in ‘decades-old’, really…) way of thinking of the political right and a good part of the left seems to be that businesspeople have much to bring to the table but what if that is simply not true? I mean, what brings success in business is above all the ability to assess and take calculated risks. And many, many entrepreneurs have behind them a long history of failure. What ultimately separates the successful ones is, apart from sheer luck, the ability to learn from the last faceplant. This is also why companies often degenerate into senescence: as they become bigger and bigger, so do the stakes until the spectre of failure stop them from taking the risks on which their survival depends. An example I am fond of quoting is Boeing which spent nearly 40 years without developing a truly new passenger plane, preferring to continually update their old designs until Airbus came along. And even then, it took a lot of time for them to abandon their old ways of thinking.
So businesspeople, when they fail, just walk away and try again. (I should say: businessmen really. I am ready to bet it’s rather more difficult for the women. See Carly Fiorina) But you cannot really do that in government. You cannot set up another country. And you cannot really take bets with nuclear war or social security or health coverage. Well, you can. The upcoming Trump administration seems ready to do it. But you shouldn’t really.
For the past few weeks a quotation has been bouncing inside my head every time there was a reference made to Trump and the people he seems intend to bring in. In the Penguin History of the USA there was this judgement on the first Reagan administration and the fact that, the author said, a lot of them came from the business world and did not understand that, just because they were in charge of the government, it did not follow that the government belonged to them. Humility is what we should be looking for in our leaders, and you don’t get much of that among entrepreneurs.
Business people usually don’t understand public goods. Success in public administration can’t be accurately measured solely by cost reductions or (worse) some kind of profit/ROI. Most of them have no idea how interconnected a lot of public spending is, so that “efficiencies” realized in one area usually turn into costs in other.
They’re also usually completely rubbish at the kind of long-horizon thinking necessary for most social programs and infrastructural investment.
And then there’s the absolute worst kind who do understand, for example, that if we gut funding for public education and aggressively prosecute a war against some drugs then our prisons earn a tidy profit for us. These are the kind of people Trump has tapped to run his administration with him.
I keep finding myself wondering how Plutarch would write him in one of his histories… would the story of Trump portrayed end up being the same as real Trump?
[…] a comment by ctygesen on Check your […]
Arnaud @ 9 –
Exactly, and the answer should be “no.” The profit motive is not the right motive for governments.
Mind you, there are business people who are also public interest-minded, and willing or eager to shift from the first to the second. But business people who stay business people and stay within that mindset and set of motivations? No.
Apart from anything else, Trump did not make himself rich. His *father* made the family rich. Trump’s multiple business ventures do not, in real terms, seem to have done anything except maintain the status quo. It has been calculated that he would have got a similar return just leaving his money in an interest bearing account…
Once you get to a certain level money makes more money with very little input required.
Arnaud – the problem is, too many people have internalized that Calvin Coolidge adage “The business of America is business.” That was wrong then, and it’s wrong now, but it’s become so much conventional wisdom that no one questions it, except for a handful of people who have been dismissed as “fringe” by the powers that be, with the willing assistance of the press.
We are not a classless society, but unlike England, we do not have a hereditary aristocracy with all sorts of titles and positions in the hierarchy. We have money. If you are rich, you are right. If you are poor, you are wrong. Middle class is a sort of nebulous term, as is working class, that can be stretched or compressed or twisted to mean whatever someone wants it to mean. In reality, middle class and working class mean the same thing to the ruling class – we do the work, they reap most of the rewards, and throw us bits and pieces, enough to keep us from rising up against them.
There is also a problem that our “classes” have been set against each other. The middle class, the working class, and the poor have a lot of reason to work together. Instead, we have been sectioned off, and each group blames one of the others for their woes. Meanwhile the rich continue to peel off more of the resources, while those who have a lot less eagerly point out that “business needs to make a profit”, without considering the question – how much profit? Obscene profit? The answer to that right now seems to be, yes, obscene profit is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you’re a loser.
I only own two motor vehicles, both elderly: a 4WD for beating around in the Australian bush, and a station wagon for all other purposes.
But this Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey life. It’s really all so dreary
The usual problems remain for the wealth-obsessed. Good servants and security guards are so hard to find these days; and the larger and more opulent one’s house/es, the more servants one needs. So one displays at the cost of one’s privacy.
And alas, one can only drive one car at a time.
God, what a bore!
;-)
I think that Thomas Piketty’s work shows that the default situation is the dominant position of inherited wealth, and that we continually gravitate towards feudalism, with its concern for ranks and social status as communicated by (for some of us) opulent display.
https://regulation.revues.org/10618?lang=en