President Donald Trump isn’t enjoying his new job, even though it’s the biggest job in the history of jobs, it’s a wonderful thing, so popular. It looked easy but turned out to be complicated, fractious, tiring, solitary, costly and even humiliating, all those nasty words spiked with “t.”
“I am president,” he announces, but the White House ant farm won’t listen. The habitat is manic. It leaks like sand.
Am I the only one to think that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meeting Trump in Washington on Monday, is fortunate to have once worked as a club bouncer? He knows the sitting position is best. Speak in low reassuring tones. Wear a great suit, Trump likes that. Talk about grand concepts: vision, greatness, bigness.
Above all, avoid details. Trump is a type. He’s the boiler room sales guy who believed his own pitch. He’s the homebuyer who gets fooled by staging — muted colours, empty rooms, smooth lines — and finds out later that there are termites and the water pipes are conceptual rather than copper.
Maybe Margaret Thatcher led him astray. One of her greatest disservices was to dumb down politics by saying the nation was like a household. “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country,” she said in 1979. She made it sound simple.
It was a destructive analogy, often used since as an argument against national debt and deficits. But households do function with a high level of risk. They take out crushing mortgages and invest in pricey education for their thankless offspring. They understand that basic things — like food, electricity and water — aren’t cheap, that redefining essentials and cutting back on them is a false economy.
But a well-run nation doesn’t gamble, especially not for sentimental reasons. It operates with an abundance of caution.
Hillary Clinton’s word “temperament” was exactly the right word for measuring Trump. He is temperamentally unsuited to being a husband and father, and he was never a CEO in the way U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was at Exxon.
The Trump Organization has only 150 people at its head office and just under 4,000 worldwide. It is weirdly tiny. That’s the most people he’s ever managed.
He claims to be able to crush in business deals. But international deals are a failure if one side is crushed. You still have to work with a foreign nation, you may need it for military bases or UN votes or as friendly backdrops for visits when no one else will host you.
Tony Soprano ran his crew better than Trump does at the White House. He took advice from Silvio at the Bada Bing.
Trump never takes advice. He’s a bad judge of character. Why else would he appoint crazy-eyes Kellyanne Conway and the ludicrous Sean Spicer to be the public face of his administration?
Upon hearing that Richie Aprile was making a move on Tony, Silvio offered Tony a considered analysis. “I genuinely don’t think there’s anything to gain by keeping him around.”
Upon hearing that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was still trying to muscle in, son-in-law Jared Kushner hit the roof. He hates Christie for having helped jail his tax-evading father Charles Kushner.
There should be no hitting of roofs in the White House. In The Sopranos, of course, there would have been an actual hit.
Trump has shown himself to be terrible at his job, which he has held down for three weeks. Yet, as Politico reports, he is desperate to “seem in control at all times.” Politico calls it “a power-keg of a workplace where job duties are unclear, morale among some is low, factionalism is rampant and exhaustion is running high.”
We will hone this further: Trump, a bad manager, would even be a lousy Mob boss. As for business, he understands neither currency devaluation nor risk calculation in health insurance, among many of the basic concepts he should have learned even before beginning to campaign.
On Monday, this is the man our prime minister will meet.
What if Trump dreams up a wall with Canada? It will be the biggest wall in the history of walls, bigger than Mexico’s, it’s conceptual, simple-minded and streamlined.
Worse, what if he proposes a merger? Would “USWe Can” or “Canadus” be the biggest country in the history of countries? The biggest show ever?
We have never needed a prime minister’s cool head more.
hmallick@thestar.ca
hmallick@thestar.ca
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