Americans of all stripes should be able to agree that the biggest management job in our nation is that of president. If managing is getting work done through others – and it is – this is the top job. Presidents can’t fight wars personally or build bridges or teach in a classroom.
Any effective manager has learned the “A” lesson in the ABCs of managing – the successes of any enterprise belong to the team, and the boss takes responsibility for the failures. It’s the only way it works long-term.
In my 40-plus years in business, I can’t think of a single manager I’d call a success who didn’t master that concept.
Which brings us to America’s top manager, who last week gave us another example (like we needed more) of what an absolutely terrible, disloyal, weasel of a boss he is.
First thing the day after Republican Roy Moore lost an unloseable race – to a Democrat in Alabama, for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general – President Donald Trump tweeted that he knew all along that Moore would lose, and that’s why he had supported Moore’s opponent in the primary.
He didn’t mention that he had campaigned for Moore, endorsed Moore and exhorted Alabamans to vote for Moore – the day before the election.
Had Moore won – and he lost by only 21,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast – who do you suppose would have taken credit for the victory?
Do you even have to suppose?
There is a reason this president has already gone through an FBI director, chief of staff, press secretary, chief strategist, two communications directors, national security adviser, uncountable staffers and other below-the-radar employees. When they displease him or he has no further use for them, out they go.
Hold on, Trump-forever people may say. Doesn’t the boss have the right to pick his staff, his own team? Shouldn’t the boss be able to demand loyalty?
The short answer is yes. The more complex answer, and Lord knows this president doesn’t traffic in complexity, is that to manage successfully, loyalty has to be a two-way street.
Of all of his immature, juvenile, knee-jerk and just plain jerk flaws, one of the worst is his compulsion to identify himself as a winner at all costs and brand all his enemies and the fallen angels on his team as losers.
It doesn’t take a posse of psychiatrists to figure that one out.
When Roy Moore lost, under the bus he went. Trump was the Roman emperor with his thumb down after the gladiators both fell to the dirt exhausted. Kill the loser.
Because I’M NOT A LOSER!
The reason I didn’t rate the winner-loser-disloyalty trait as Trump’s worst flaw is because nothing can top his unfamiliarity with, and disregard for, truth and facts. When this became so obvious, even to his own people, adviser Kellyanne Conway came up with a workaround, “alternative facts.”
That one was so special, so inspired, that it required a double-take then and still does.
It has a touch of humor embedded in its own contradictory ridiculousness. It’s kind of a wink at the much less refined “fake news” that Trump and his minions favor, which refers, as best I can tell, to any reports that criticize his lordship or his latest impulses.
Alternative facts gush like Niagara Falls out of the president’s mouth, so many and so fast that it takes a team of fact-checkers to keep up. It is an unprecedented flood of inaccuracies, exaggerations and outright lies.
The hell of it is, I think the man himself believes most of it. Richard Nixon once told interviewer David Frost, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Sadly for him, Congress disagreed and was prepared to impeach Nixon before he resigned the presidency in 1974.
Trump has translated that misguided notion – subconsciously in all likelihood because I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t know who David Frost was, or possibly Nixon either – into, “If the president says it, it’s not a lie.”
That means each morning we must await the president to determine that day’s reality. Yesterday’s facts could now be alternative facts or worse, fake news!
It makes it hard to plan your week.
It still fascinates me to interact, at a safe distance, with people to whom all this makes no difference whatsoever. They are Trump people and think he’s great, he’s succeeding, the swamp is being drained and the press should be imprisoned or deported for disloyalty to the king. All of which makes me suspect there aren’t many history students among them.
I will give the president this: It probably is the most fascinating political period of my lifetime, though in the way that a slow-motion, multi-car crash is fascinating. You know it’s horrible, you know people could get hurt, but you can’t look away.
Unlike the lurid scene at a crash, this is one pileup we have a duty as citizens to monitor.
