“It’s the economy, stupid,” James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, offered as explanation of a rare defeat of an incumbent president in 1992. Three presidents and 24 years later, frustrated by the slow recovery after the Great Recession, some voters thought “a businessman” could turn things around, and put Trump in. Trump isn’t much of a businessman, but I won’t go into that here.
As a rule of thumb, people from business usually aren’t good at politics, because it requires different skills, but most at least understand that governing in a democracy is different from running a business. Not so Trump. He tried to run the Government of the United States like a family business (some would argue he ran it like a Mafia family), violating the Constitution, breaking laws, and getting himself impeached in the process. Why was he so peculiarly inept?
Let’s start with this commentary by CNN’s Chris Cizilla (read it here), who is talking about today’s (Tuesday, December 8, 2020) Supreme Court ruling (read about it here), which is not the focus of my article, but what he says well serves my purposes (emphasis added):
” … [T]he Supreme Court on Tuesday unraveled Donald Trump’s grand plan to overthrow the 2020 election. … [T]he Trump team filed a slew of lawsuits … designed to lean on judges that he had appointed … to deliver a delay or a redo of the election. The ultimate goal for Trump was to get one of those cases … in front of the Supreme Court … where he had appointed three conservative justices … and where the President clearly believed he could expect a favorable ruling. That plan, it quickly became clear, was deeply flawed.
“How did Trump (and his legal team) miscalculate so badly? Simple. Trump believed that the Supreme Court operates the same way he does: Purely transactionally. See, in Trump’s mind, he had given Supreme Court seats to Barrett as well as Justice Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh …, therefore, they owed him. That is, of course, not how the Supreme Court works. … That Trump couldn’t understand that speaks to how incapable he is of understanding anyone who doesn’t operate from a purely transactional place.
The key word here is “transactional,” which in this context (i.e., in Trump’s thinking) implies trading what is seen as a favor in exchange for an expected future favor. (Continues below video)
While there’s certainly a lot of horse trading in politics, there’s none in the courts, and what Trump wants isn’t a tradeable commodity in other corridors of government, either, except for some disgusting Republican legislators and members of Congress. Courts decide cases by the law; election officials run elections according to the law. Court decisions and election results aren’t tradeable commodities.
The problem is, Trump thinks of the judges he appoints as his employees, and believes he can buy off legislators, governors, and secretaries of state with favors (he offered Pennsylvania GOP legislators more federal Covid aid if they flipped their state’s electoral votes to him) or demand them on the basis of partisan or personal loyalty. That’s corruption of the highest order, and what we’re seeing is that not one Republican governor, secretary of state, or judge has been willing to stoop to it. Our democratic institutions may not be rock-solid, but they’re holding.
I said “transactional” is the key word because Trump has a transactional mind and can only think in terms of transactions. For example, when he wanted dirt on Joe Biden, he held up military aid approved by Congress for Ukraine, intending to trade the one for the other. In business, this is simply buying and selling, but in government it’s corruption, and got him impeached. (As he should have been.)
In government, there are things you can trade for (your bridge for my highway), and things you can’t (I’ll pay you to pardon so-and-so). Trump’s problem is he can’t tell the difference. He thinks transactionally all the time. That’s why he’s incapable of understanding that cabinet members, senior military officers, and other government officials owe their loyalty to the country and the public they serve, not to him personally. That’s also why he uses the powers of office for his personal benefit — in every transaction, there has to be something in it for him. He’s incapable of thinking any other way. That’s also way he’s incapable of appreciating the sacrifices of our war dead (he literally asked, “what was in it for them?”).
Voters who didn’t think this through elected a businessman thinking they were getting some sort of acumen, and instead got a businessman who tried to run the U.S. government like a family business, and ran it for his own profit — because he’s incapable of thinking like a governor or president. Electing businessmen to govern rarely works out well, but never has it failed so spectacularly as it did this time.
Because governing isn’t transactional at all. It’s about listening to other people’s needs and doing things for them. Because this is their country and government, and the job of a public servant is to serve. Finally, what Trump understood least about governing, and the leading cause of his failure, is that presidents preside, not rule. Governing is a cooperative enterprise in which there are many players, and while the buck stops with the president and he makes the big decisions, it is nothing like running a family business.
As a rule of thumb, people from business usually aren’t good at politics, because it requires different skills, but most at least understand that governing in a democracy is different from running a business. Not so Trump. He tried to run the Government of the United States like a family business (some would argue he ran it like a Mafia family), violating the Constitution, breaking laws, and getting himself impeached in the process. Why was he so peculiarly inept?