Wall Street Journal, Trump, And The Pitfalls Of “A Plutocrat’s Hubris”

Donald Trump campaigned on the notion that because he was a successful businessman, he would be a good commander-in-chief.

There’s a fundamental problem with that contention. Namely, that we (voters) aren’t patrons and “commander-in-chief” doesn’t equate to “CEO.”

See Americans aren’t customers. We own the store. The President works for us. Not the other way around.

Trump doesn’t understand that, which in many ways explains why he hasn’t been very effective at getting anything done.

But beyond that most basic of concepts, Trump also doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that being a real estate mogul doesn’t bestow upon said mogul infinite wisdom when it comes to things that have absolutely nothing to do with real estate. Trump’s failure to understand this is readily apparent in his hilarious incredulity at lawmakers’ reluctance to back slapdash attempts to overhaul the nation’s health care system and the judiciary’s cautious approach when it comes to executive orders that are, at the very least, questionable from a Constitutional perspective.

Given the above, I thought a new editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Trump And A Plutocrat’s Hubris” was particularly interesting. It’s written by Joseph Epstein.

Via WSJ

In the petit-bourgeois, confidently philistine milieu in which I grew up, plutocratic values held a firm purchase. When the men gathered in the living room after dinner, money talked–that is, those who had found the greatest financial success tended to dominate the conversation. Since Lou Riskin had made a killing in the mail-order business, the assumption was that he had penetrating things to say on the subject of urban renewal. Saul Levine had run the most successful Buick agency in the city, therefore definitely worth listening to him hold forth on welfare.

When I hear Donald Trump talk, I think of how much at home he would have felt in those living rooms. The guy’s a multibillionaire, cleaned up in real estate, so why shouldn’t he know about health care, immigration, life in the inner cities? Or if he doesn’t know, no reason why with a bit of quick study he can’t find out enough to put everything in order.

My father was a moderately successful businessman–for a kid who never finished high school, an immensely successful one–but too well-mannered to wish to dominate these living-room discussions. Yet he had no argument with the underlying rules of the game. As an adolescent, I heard several of his business homilies: If you work for a man for a dollar an hour, always give him two dollars worth of effort; you make your money not in selling, but in buying right; you can’t argue with success.

That last bit was the only one that, as I grew older, began to get on my nerves. What, I would ask my father, is better to argue with? How the success was achieved, what went into it, who suffered because of it? By success my father meant financial success. Not that he didn’t recognize achievement in science, athletics, entertainment. The money game, though, was the real one, and not the least satisfying thing about it was the tidy means of keeping score: How much, in hard cash, did one come out with in the end?

I am someone who finds it difficult to think about money for more than two minutes at a time. I cannot marshal the concentration even to read the financial statements about my own investments. When they arrive, I scramble down to the bottom line to learn what I made or lost during the past month. I rather envy those who have earned enough money to sit out forever from the financial wars, but I do not envy them sufficiently to drop the things that interest me more in order to emulate them. Moneymaking seems a useful skill, but not much more. I’ve known too many ninnies who seem to have mastered it to be in thrall myself.

A strong argument can be made that, contra Trump, success in business is too narrow to transfer to other realms. Orderly thought is needed for success of any kind. So, too, the clarity to get outside oneself to grasp the larger forces involved in any complicated transaction. Confidence helps, to be sure. But making a wad in real estate, mail order or auto sales does not impart any special advantage in understanding the complexities of health care, African-American culture or foreign policy–as Mr. Trump and his billionaire-laden cabinet are discovering.

President Trump’s first weeks in office demonstrate the hubris of the plutocrat. The defeats began with his releasing an immigration order neither well thought out nor even quite legal. He obviously did not investigate thoroughly the men he hired for key positions in his campaign ( Paul Manafort ) or his administration ( Mike Flynn ). On health care, he evidently had no notion of the variety of views within his newly adopted party.

I’ve not read “The Art of the Deal,” nor do I plan to do so during this life, but I should imagine that the heart of any effective negotiation is finding common interests among those at the bargaining table. In business, the paramount common interest is obvious: money, profit all round. In politics, it turns out, much more is usually entailed.

In government, unlike business, many things cannot be delegated. Careful study may be sufficient for determining where to build a new hotel, but an understanding of varied, often subtle human motives is required to compose and pass a complex piece of legislation.

That financial success does not easily, or always, transfer into other realms is now obvious. Let us hope that the evidence on display during the early days of his administration will soon humble even so arrogant a man as our new president. Donald Trump and those who support him ought to think about arguing with success, at least as the plutocrats construe it.