stevenvh.net

Trump

How good a manager is Donald Trump?

Trump's presidential campaign is in dire straits as he is losing ground to his opponent day by day. One would think a good manager would comprehend this and take the appropriate actions to fix this. Well, at least if you really want to become president of the US. A good manager would be able to tell the essential from the trivial, and focus on the former.

Not Donald Trump. While his own survival is at stake he watches TV, and picks fights with the media and whines in his tweets on how badly they treat him. The constant in Trump's tweets is “low ratings” [yawn].

Both his attention to the media and the “low ratings” can easily be explained. Trump suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and people with NPD have a tremendous need of admiration. For Trump being on television is extremely important, more than what he stands for, and the measure is ratings. In fact Trump's whole world can be summed up in six words: “high ratings good, low ratings bad”. That's all that matters.

So it's no surprise then that, while his whole campaign collapses beneath him, Trump for the umpteenth time sends a tweet like

Morning Joe's weakness is its low ratings. I don't watch anymore but I heard he went wild against Rudy Giuliani and #2A – sad & irrelevant!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2016

Success in business?

One may reply that Trump seems to be a successful businessman, though. Well, that remains to be seen. Trump claims to be worth well more than 10 billion dollars, but that may be a trait of the exaggerated feelings of self-importance that are typical of people with NPD. If he's really worth that much he can easily show it by releasing his tax returns, which he always keeps stonewalling. A reasonal assumption could be that he is worth far less. The New Yorker reports  that Forbes estimates Trump's fortune at 4.5 billion dollars, while Bloomberg goes for 2.9 billion dollars. While still a lot of money, there's a big difference which needs to be explained. It appears that there is a lot of hot air. For instance, Trump told Forbes that he could sell his stake in Trump Tower for two, or even three billion dollars. Forbes and Bloomberg value it at 530 million dollars and 490 million dollars, resp.

If Trump is self-financing his campaign, as he claims, and if he's really worth that much it should be easy to find a million dollars or so in some drawer. But that's not what we see. The Hill reports :

“The Donald Trump campaign sent its first ‘emergency’ fundraising email to supporters Saturday, seeking to raise at least $100,000 by the end of the day. That request follows a multimillion-dollar ad blitz launched by Hillary Clinton.”

Trump also claims the Trump brand is worth 3 billion dollars, while Forbes values it at 125 million dollars. (And even of that sum Trump may have lost several tens of millions of dollars due to his disastrous campaign.)

Donald Trump lies all the time, as becomes clear in this article in the Washington Post . Lawyers asked Trump: “Have you ever not been truthful” about your net worth? Trump’s answer here was that the truth about his wealth was — in essence — up to him to decide.

Trump: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings. But I try.”

Well, that explains how Forbes' 125 million dollars suddenly becomes a number 24 times higher; Trump simply invents his wealth.

“Building a brand may be more important than building a business.”

— Donald Trump, “Midas Touch”

Apart from these numbers there is also Trump's ruinous record of business failures , including a handful of bankruptcies:

Trump may see himself as a Midas (remember his NPD!), but he is anything but that. Like Bloomberg says :

Trump doesn't have a “track record in business” that's persuasively “proven”.

Trump isn't the great dealmaker he claims to be  (although dealmaking in politics is something completely different from business dealmaking).

Managing requires foresight

Trump is infamous for having a failsafe plan for anything, like eradicating ISIS quickly. He doesn't say how he would do this, and nobody really believes he has something concrete in mind. His attitude is further illustrated in the following conversation with Bill O'Reilly. Trump said he’d spoken with an unnamed officer there who promised that if he were in charge, he’d have Chicago’s violence licked inside of a week.

O'Reilly: “But he didn’t tell you exactly, precisely how? Because that’s what people wanna know.”

Trump: “No. And I didn’t ask him. I’m sure he’s got a strategy. I didn’t ask him his strategy.”

Conclusion

While a good manager can focus on the essential, Trump can't even do so when his existence depends on it. Since Trump isn't even able to manage his own campaign, he is unfit to be the president of a nation of 320 million people.