President Trump: America’s CEO

Donald Trump has as much potential as anyone else to be a good president. He has the ability to bring about change and “Make America Great Again”. Ronald Reagan was known as “the great communicator”. Trump could very well be remembered as “the great administrator”. Trump supporters have often pointed to ‘The Donald’s’ business experience as a main reason to elect him president. One of the top priorities of a business executive is to hire the right people to do the work for him. The president is the head of the executive branch and has a very similar job description. If Trump wants to be a successful president he will have to strengthen economic relations with foreign powers, make domestic reforms, and be the country’s CEO.

Mr. Trump has a list of goals that he wants to achieve despite a lack of a specific plan.¹ (I and many others have openly accosted him for it.) But what if Trump plans to evenly distribute the powers of his office to specialists? If that’s the case, then he doesn’t need to have a plan. His appointees will be supplying him with multiple plans to solve our many problems. One of the issues that President Trump will have to overcome is the fall-out of the former administration’s foreign policy. Mr. Trump has promised during this early campaign that he could make Mexico build the wall that many Americans want at our southern border. But how could he possibly achieve this? Mexico is a sovereign nation which makes its own decisions with its own best interests in mind. Not even Donald Trump can force them to do something that they don’t want. That is, unless he can manipulate foreign trade in a way that no other president in history has been able to since Jefferson bought Louisiana, confining French influence to Canada. Trump and many of his supporters believe that he is the man for the job. In his announcement speech, Mr. Trump alluded to the many lobbyists that work for him in business, “Hey, I have lobbyists. I have to tell you. I have lobbyists that can produce anything for me.”² A good lobbyist can find loopholes in any deal, including the trade deals with China, Russia, Mexico, and the Middle East. Finding these loopholes will, in theory, force renegotiations and grant the United States the type of leverage necessary to get what we want. Trump’s best plan to initiate change in the way America interacts with other world powers would be to start with a task force of negotiators that can be sent to different parts of the world. The Secretary of State would then be able to supervise their progress. The Secretary would then report to the President, who will have the final say. Donald Trump’s greatest strength is his mastery over the art of the deal. Teams of seasoned lobbyists under the guidance of Donald Trump could be the key to reasserting American prominence abroad.

This is also how Mr. Trump should approach domestic issues such as reforming health care and the IRS. Instead of lobbyists, however, we are going to need doctors and accountants. After all, it’s the lobbyists who got us into this mess in the first place. Mr. Trump, a man with absolutely no medical training whatsoever, praised the single-payer health-care systems of Canada and Scotland. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky immediately jumped in to remind Mr. Trump that American conservatives have been against the single-payer system for decades. Sen. Paul spent more than a decade as an optometrist who was commonly praised as a gifted eye surgeon. He and fellow candidate Ben Carson are uncomfortably familiar with insurance companies. Knowing what problems they had to deal with as doctors lends invaluable experience to these two candidates that Trump just does not have. The same holds true when it comes to the reformation of the American tax code. Donald Trump recognizes, like every other tax-payer in the country, that everything is just too complicated around April 15. The same question presents itself here that appears in the health-care conversation. How do you simplify the tax code? Many candidates have proposed a flat tax of somewhere around fifteen per cent. Trump is not an accountant or a doctor but he can lead the movement to fix both systems by hiring the right accountants and doctors for the job. Trump can easily appoint someone like Carson or Paul to serve as Surgeon General and give them the power to hire their own teams to research and ultimately work with law-makers to fix our health-care quagmire. Trump does not have any experience in fixing the tax code. He has never tried to write an amendment to the tax code. One thing that President Trump could do to help Congress balance the budget is to put them into contact with some of those “short little guys that wear yarmulkes all day”³ and have them advise the people’s representatives on how to best fix the tax code.  President Trump would only have to manage the projects.

The defining characteristic of a successful Trump presidency would be the easiest and most natural thing for an executive like Mr. Trump to do: hire great people and stay out of their way. If Trump does decide to become the great administrator that he has the potential to be, he will have to adopt the mindset that made him successful in business. For example, the leadership of the Development and Acquisitions branch of Trump International Realty is disbursed into the hands of four different people. Trump’s oldest son, Donald Jr., “directs new project acquisition and development” across the globe. He also manages the company’s portfolio. Daughter Ivanka is in charge of the Trump International brokerage division and manages the expansion of the company’s interests domestic and abroad. Eric Trump is a jack of all trades managing property deals and single hotels alike and Naomi Muramatsu is “the central director for Trump International Realty’s offices world-wide”.⁴ All of these people have scores of managers and assistant managers working beneath them who handle the day-to-day issues and make sure that things go smoothly. The point is: President Trump can be very successful by appropriating certain powers found in the executive office to the right people and forming a working relationship with the elected representatives in Congress. Most importantly, President Trump will have to realize that he cannot bend the rules to meet his ends as he has admitted to have done in business several times since he announced his campaign⁵.

Trump has the potential to be the best president that America has ever seen if he sees himself as the country’s CEO. America does not need another president whose hubris convinces him that he can create policy with the stroke of his pen. We’ve had enough of that. What America does need now is an executive. We need an administrator who can hire the right people to make good trade deals, reform health-care and the tax code, and above all someone who will stand out of the way and let those professionals do their job. Mr. Trump has yet to convince me to vote for him in the primary, let alone the general election. But, if Mr. Trump can exhibit more of the CEO who holds the welfare of thousands in his hands daily and less of the bragadocious spotlight hog that I know him to be, he just might get my vote.

Part Three of Seventeen

Part One: Five Reasons to Vote for Carly Fiorina https://theelephantsconscience.com/2015/08/07/five-reasons-to-vote-for-carly-fiorina/

Part Two: Why You Should Vote for Bobby Jindal https://theelephantsconscience.com/2015/08/08/why-you-should-vote-for-bobby-jindal/

1. Written prior to his plan on immigration with Jeff Sessions.
2. http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/
3. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/30/the-dumbest-stuff-donald-trump-has-ever-said.html
4. http://www.trumpinternationalrealty.com/leadership/sees
5. 1^st Republican Debate of 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px8p9jkMA7s