Will the Real Donald Trump Please Stand Up?

In the Beginning...  I wish to make clear that I favored neither candidate in the 2016 presidential race.  Had Mrs. Clinton won, this piece would be an analysis of her just as this is of Mr. Trump.  The essential points for this blog have been hanging out in my computer since shortly after the election and are largely unaltered by more recent events.

The election is over.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million individual votes.  Donald Trump won the presidency by collecting 308 electoral votes.  Whatever you think about the candidates and the Electoral College, it’s all over but the swearing in.  The sure winners here are the Russians, who probably never dreamed they could get so much credit and free press for hacking emails.  But what about Americans?  What have we got?

Donald J. Trump, soon to be POTUS.

Trump Supporters.  It is impossible to categorize the people who voted for Mr. Trump as one homogeneous group.  They are not a basket of deplorables.  They are not all rednecks.  They are not mostly from the alt-right (whoever they are).  More than 40% of them are college graduates.  So why did a diverse cross section of America pick Mr. Trump?  (Maybe not as diverse as Mrs. Clinton’s base, but certainly not monolithic.)  They bought the message and gave the messenger a free pass because they badly wanted the message Mr. Trump was sending to be heard.  His words were their thoughts and feelings.  When you want something badly enough, you will engage in magical thinking in the hopes of getting it.  Reality takes a back seat to desire.  The allure of the shiny pickup at the dealership overcomes the knowledge that the limited paycheck can’t handle the payments.  In the case of the election, Trump voters wanted at least the prospect of something very different from politics and government as usual, even if it seemed to others to be improper or irrational.  Magic may be possible.  Gullibility has no party affiliation.

The Message and the Messenger.  Mr. Trump found the message his supporters wanted to hear and he gave it to them.  The voters became like the students at Trump University -- recipients of a great sales pitch from the man who literally wrote the book.  The message recognized that they had been overlooked.  As the middle class, they have suffered in the great recession.  They have not shared in the prosperity of the recovery like the top percentage of citizens.  These laborers have been left behind while the owners of capital (investors) have forged forward economically.  As whites, they have been overlooked by the media who has focused on minority and gay rights.  “White” didn’t count for anything anymore.  It was the background for everyone else’s issues.  As rural Americans, they found someone who paid attention to them.  Some heard an intolerance toward immigrants they found comforting.  Playing to this baser nature of the populace is the definition of a demagogue.  The founding fathers were greatly concerned about a demagogue seizing the popular sentiment to the detriment of good government.  Not since George Wallace’s overt racism have we seen a message that appealed so much to intolerance by innuendo if not outright pronouncement.  Even women voted for Mr. Trump despite his crass sexual statements.  Did they do this because for some of them, that’s the way life is?  Did he only put words to a reality they live in?  Where’s the harm in that?  Women who voted against him obviously felt differently.  Throughout the campaign, the piper played a tune enticing to enough forgotten followers to place him in office.

Unfortunately, by buying the message and not being more selective about the messenger, these voters have bought a package that may not contain what they expect once it is opened in the oval office.  Mr. Trump’s personal characteristics that made him an effective campaigner, and those that did not, will carry over to the presidency.  They may not play well on that stage.  For that reason, we need to look more closely at the messenger himself.  For the voters who bought into “Hope and Change” eight years ago and were disappointed, there may be an equal number of people who bought into “Make America Great” who will feel the same disappointment in the next four years.  What we get when a president takes office is partly the message, but it is totally the messenger. 

Disclaimer.  At this point I insert the disclaimer that this is a personal blog and I am not a professional psychologist or psychiatrist.  What I have to offer are my observations based on years of working with managers in corporations. 

Smart Cookie.  To his credit, Mr. Trump is smart.  You don’t get to be a multimillionaire without having brains.  Those brains are also very calculating.  Mr. Trump’s calculus appears to center on enriching and aggrandizing himself.  Hence the “Trump” brand.  He doesn’t own the buildings, he just puts his name on them and that is worth money.  Amazing and lucrative.  So long as Mr. Trump believes that doing good for the country will benefit him, things will go well.  However, when the two interests diverge, we can expect Mr. Trump to do what is best for him and to paint whatever picture he feels necessary to convince the nation it is good for them, or at least does not matter.  The current issue of including his family members in government meetings and his unwillingness to fully separate himself from his business interests is only the beginning of this behavior.  Andrew Jackson brought the political “spoils system” to American government.  What Mr. Trump will bring is yet to be seen.

Fact vs. Fiction.  By now it is more than evident that Mr. Trump has a tenuous relationship with facts and the truth.  He seems to follow Hamlet’s logic “...for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  Regardless of objective reality, if Mr. Trump deems it good, or huge, or wonderful, it is.  If he thinks it bad, or ugly, or sad, it is.  And, one day it may be bad, but the next it may be good.  Mitt Romney was heavily criticized in his campaign for “flip flopping,” but compared to Mr. Trump, he was a rock of consistency.  What are we to expect from a president that is constantly changing his stance?  To answer that question, we need to move past the positions and look at the psyche of Mr. Trump.  What is he really like?  How will that play out in his presidency?

The Man and the Mask.  Mr. Trump has multiple personas.  He crafts an image to suit his audience or his objective.  That’s the reason this blog is titled “Will the Real Donald Trump Please Stand Up?”  We all adjust our behavior a bit depending upon the role we find ourselves in.  Being a parent is different from being an employee at work.  Being a nurse at work is different from being a volunteer firefighter in our off hours.  That’s normal.  Being president of the United States brings with it a huge host of expectations from a multitude of different constituencies.  Who are you to the Russians, the Chinese, the French, the Mexicans, the Australians, the veterans, the farmers, the business owners, the military, the governors, the teachers, the Congress?  The list is endless.  Our problem is that we don’t know what persona Mr. Trump will craft to meet all these conflicting expectations.  Every president is shaped by the office.  Mr. Trump will be no exception.  The problem is, the way he shifts positions, we have no clear picture of what president Trump will really be.  The problem for Mr. Trump may be that since he cannot craft a persona to appeal to each group, and he cannot find one persona they all like, he will fail to receive the adulation he so greatly craves.  Without that, he may find the office of president distinctly distasteful to the point of departure.  On the other hand, he has the ability to craft personas.

All Things Great and Small.  Mr. Trump has a very large ego.  You need one to run for president because campaigns are brutal.  Unfortunately, Mr. Trump also has a weak ego.  A large weak ego is a liability because it makes the person easy to manipulate.  If you are going to have a large ego, it needs to be strong (as in calmly self-assured, not arrogant).  We know Mr. Trump has a large ego from his own references to how great he is and the publicity he seeks (advocating the “birther” movement is one easy example of attention seeking).  We know he has a weak ego because of his reactions during the debates and from his  Twitter responses whenever someone criticizes him.  As Harry Truman remarked, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”  Mr. Trump is now chef-in-chief and the kitchen of the presidency is unlike anything he has ever encountered.  When you are the chief executive of your own business, people do things your way.  When you hold political office, everyone wants to do things their own ways.  Unless you can line up enough ducks by the careful use of power and persuasion, you do not get what you want.  President Obama’s last six years are testimony to that.  Being the bully on the block will barely budge a bureaucracy.  Ironically, that bureaucratic anchor may be what keeps the Trump ship of state from straying too far off its historic course.

HUGE!  Mr. Trump likes big projects.  He takes on debt.  He is a risk taker - especially with other people’s money.  Put these together and you will see him propose massive programs that require increased government spending.  It never got much play in the press during the campaign, but if you listened closely at times, you heard that both Hillary and Donald had agendas that significantly increased spending and the national debt -- his even more than hers.  Since Mr. Trump will be spending our money and not his, we can expect him to promise us “HUGE” things.  If he can reform the tax code to increase government revenue and not decrease it, he may be able to pay for his programs; otherwise our debt problem will get worse.  He’ll take the credit for a major boost in infrastructure and we will be paying for it forever.  We do need the infrastructure improvements, but we also need a responsible way to fund them.  Let's see what happens.

Speak Loudly and Carry a Big Stick.  Mr. Trump’s style is over-the-top oratory.  If he does it, it is GREAT.  If someone else does the same thing it may be merely OK.  If you are Mr. Trump’s pick for a cabinet post, you are WONDERFUL.  If you are an existing administration office holder, you are stupid.  This reshaping of the world is not a sign of balanced thinking.  His willingness to make bold statements and then double down on them when they are proven wrong did not hurt him during the campaign.  It will be devastating if it comes from a president.  Every little action is analyzed by other persons or countries looking for any subtle message.  Diplomacy requires both boldness and subtlety.  Mr. Trump may provide us with the first extreme example in modern history where the president had only one of those characteristics.  The result of missing subtlety is hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and conflict.  The phone call Mr Trump accepted from the president of Taiwan (and the response from China) is just the first of what promises to be a string of diplomatic missteps from Mr. Trump.  A bad Tweet may set off an international incident - a historical first we can do without.  (Since I first wrote this, Mr. Trump tweeted about expanding our nuclear arsenal -- a reversal of decades of arms reductions.)

Ethics or Legalities.  Mr. Trump is ethically challenged.  His treatment of contractors on his projects, his misleading pitch for Trump University, his bankruptcies that left other investors holding the bag all point to a man who is more than willing to put his interests ahead of everyone else.  This is becoming all too apparent as he inserts his family into the affairs of the presidency.  While Mr. Trump will not do anything illegal, that is not the standard for a president’s behavior.  We expect more than legal compliance, we expect a moral and ethical examplar for our country.  (Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton being the poster children for the opposite of what we want.)  The president is a role model.  Mr. Trump appears to either not appreciate or not care about that aspect of the office.  Yet.

The Smartest Guys in the Room.  Mr. Trump is apparently not prone to listen to others.  He may be better at that in private than it appears in public, but he seems to be an autocratic leader.  If you consider yourself the smartest guy in the room (“I know more than the generals”), why listen to anyone else?  Autocrats, when they have a firm grasp on reality and a good moral compass, can be visionary leaders.  They can push and prod an organization to a greatness its members cannot envision for themselves.  Think Steve Jobs and Apple.  But autocrats can also be despots.  They suck up all the power and make all the decisions.  Everyone else becomes a pawn in an autocrat’s game.  That usually ends badly as the pawns often collectively know more than the king.  Think Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Picking Up the Reality Check.  Mr. Trump seems capable of dismissing proven reality.  Global climate change is an easy  example.  There is irrefutable evidence of melting arctic ice and glaciers around the globe.  That water raises the ocean level.  A high ocean means more coastal flooding.  It is so obvious that our own Navy is concerned about its bases being compromised by climate change.  What causes the ice to melt?  Warmer temperatures.  What causes that?  Greenhouse gases - mainly carbon dioxide and methane.  Blame power plants, industry, and cars for the carbon dioxide.  Blame cows for the methane.  Yes, those billions of burgers served came after the cows belched out tons of methane on their way to the bun.  The physics of man-made climate change and its effects are as basic and undeniable as the inside of a car heating up in the sun.  What about all those jobs that went to China and Mexico?  Did they really?  Some certainly did, but many more disappeared as a result of automation right here in America.  We have fewer manufacturing jobs, but produce more goods than before.  We substituted equipment for labor and cost ourselves employment in the process.  Blaming a foreign country makes for good speeches, but not recognizing the reality makes for poor policy.  A president who can ignore or twist reality will not make correct decisions.  Not everything is a matter of opinion.  Many issues rest on a factual reality.  It remains to be seen how much Mr. Trump lives in world of his own make-believe versus a real one.

Frustration.  Mr. Trump will find himself restrained and frustrated by factors beyond his control.  Autocrats crave control and Mr. Trump will be vexed enormously when he cannot get his way.  The government bureaucracy with its slow and creaky movement will stymie his attempts at rapid change.  Career civil servants have little to fear in opposing political office holders.  Executive power peters out the further down the chain of command it goes.  Mr. Trump will be frustrated by foreign powers, both friendly and unfriendly.  Nations have their own agendas.  Unless Mr. Trump can manifest unseen behaviors for diplomacy and collaboration, he will find he cannot force his agenda on our allies and certainly not on our opponents.  Lashing out at the opposition, as he has done, will only intensify his problems and ours.

Push My Button, Please.  Lastly, Mr. Trump may end up being one of the most manipulated presidents of our time while thinking he is in charge.  A large, but weak, ego needs constant feeding.  It will not take long for leaders of all stripes to figure this out.  Foreign countries will stroke that ego to gain his favorable opinion and favorable treatment.  Businesses may do likewise.  Wall Street will certainly sweeten the pot for the president.  Because he enjoys personal gain so much, even the specter of unethical dealing will not hamper his actions so long as they are not overtly illegal.  Mr. Trump’s play book does not come from a hymnal.  It comes from the volumes of legal codes lining the walls of attorneys.  The fair-dealing folks of the heartland will eventually find this behavior repugnant.

Available Options.  What will Donald Trump be as president?  Will he be the opportunistic, egotistical, risk taking, ethically challenged, abrasive, autocratic loose cannon with his finger on the nuclear trigger?   Will he be the champion of the working class, the fixer of the economy, the protector of the nation, the savior of the inner cities, the reformer of the tax code, the builder of the great wall?

In the end, Donald J. Trump may not be the president anyone expected.

He will not deliver on many of the promises he made to those who elected him.  Much of what he promised is simply not possible, let alone advisable.  Hillary will not go to jail.  Mexico will not build a wall.  Illegal immigrants will not be deported in large numbers.  ISIS will not be swiftly ground into the desert dust.  Jobs will not stop going overseas.  By the same token, he will not be the scourge his opposition fears.  Bureaucracy and the balance of powers inherent in our government will hobble his attempts to eliminate Obamacare.  It may change (as it needs to), but its elements will not all disappear.  The environment will not get raped.  Coal will not suddenly be burned in power plants because many coal plants have been decommissioned or irreversibly changed to natural gas.  He will make change, but more slowly and less drastically than he advertises.  The one place Mr. Trump may actually tip the scales is in his appointments to the Supreme Court.  That remains to be seen. 

The greatest danger of all will be if Mr. Trump subverts the operation of legitimate government agencies to harass or exact revenge on his opposition or perceived enemies or to advance his personal interests.  A personality that cannot distinguish the appropriate limits to executive power will pose the most dangerous challenge our republic has seen in a very long time.

The End and the Beginning.  The election is over and the unknown is upon us.  Will the real Donald Trump please stand up?