The world's most disastrous CEO

A gormless elder son who may have just pushed his father into treasonous hot water, a controversy involving a Russian lawyer with close links to the sinister Vladimir Putin and a playboy tabloid journalist turned music producer with Kremlin oligarch connections — if they’re looking for one, the scriptwriters for Season 6 of House of Cards have a ready-made plot at hand. But business leaders who have openly or secretly admired Donald Trump’s heretical chutzpah should consider his five months in charge as a cautionary tale. 

“The reality is that his ‘Make America great’ policy is going to make America a wonderful place to invest in,” Anand Mahindra had said at the annual Nasscom summit in February. 

The reality is that Mr Trump’s governance style has revealed the business world in the worst possible light. 

Had Mr Trump been the CEO of any publicly listed company, his first five months in office would have persuaded the board to dismiss him forthwith. How many boards would have tolerated a CEO whose first few months consisted of the following: Drawing a blank on his stated agenda — the equivalent of being unable to pass any significant legislation despite his party controlling both houses of Congress; stirring up serial petty controversies through incessant, undignified tweets; setting himself in open confrontation with key stakeholders (the judiciary, investigative agencies, the press, and European allies); opening his campaign to investigation for collusion with a major adversary; and exposing himself as a serial liar? 

If his approval rating were a proxy for a stock price, then Mr Trump has critically eroded shareholder value.  

If Mr Trump’s stint in office has demonstrated anything at all, it is the limits of applying corporate practices and values to the business of running a country. The talents that can maximise personal wealth or shareholder value are not always compatible with the skills required to maximise public welfare. Not that Mr Trump is a unique thinker in this respect. Several corporate leaders, from HP’s Carly Fiorina, to Meg Whitman (the current HP chief, formerly of eBay) and Mitt Romney (former CEO of Bain Capital), have been lured by a belief in the illusory benefits of transposing corporate management praxes on public office. 

Mr Romney, to be sure, had some relatively respectable credentials to run for President, having served as Governor of Massachusetts. His chief achievement there was introducing health insurance reform that became the model on which Barack Obama based his signature Affordable Care Act. In a quirky inversion of positions, Mr Obama and his administration openly admitted to this; but Mr Romney, running against him on the Republican ticket in the 2012 elections, did his best to repudiate his own achievements because it contradicted his party’s pro-business, free market principles (which is why his party is trying to undo Obamacare now). 

If the best practices of constitutional democracy are keeping him in office, Mr Trump represents the very worst practices of corporate America. His unlisted, family-run real estate and event management business had a well-established reputation for dubiousness and a simplistically crude management style, none of it remotely applicable to the realities of governing a republic as complex as the United States. 

Consider: Mr Trump equates negotiating with deal-making and he prides himself on these skills. His technique might work in his realty and event management empire. In politics, agendas are rarely so clear cut and demand weighing policy options. For example: Selling weaponry to the Saudi Arabians and Qataris may be a great “deal” for the stock prices of America’s arms manufacturers. Such humdinger packages may hold the promise of creating the thousands of manufacturing jobs Mr Trump spoke of on the campaign trail, though growing automation makes this appear unlikely. That such deals may seriously compromise peace in West Asia does not seem to have occurred to the administration as it now scrambles to contain the fallout from the Saudi-Qatar stand-off. 

Running a business empire that favours family, however inept, may be acceptable in the corporate world, especially if those firms are not subject to the scrutiny of the markets. As president, Mr Trump has placed his family in roles that are conveniently outside direct accountability to Congress. His daughter’s unspecified advisory role in the White House is not even the most egregious of these appointments. Appointing in a similar role a son-in-law who has made a mess of his own family-run real estate business and has been a disaster in foreign policy surely does not serve America’s interests. 

Jared Kushner has, in fact, proved himself singularly unfit for his position. “Bringing peace to the Middle East” was one of his multiple Key Result Areas, to use corporate-speak. Look how that’s worked out. With nothing to show for the awesome responsibilities that the President heaped on him, he’s in the spotlight because suspicions of collusion with Russians during the election campaign are coagulating into hard evidence, thanks in no small measure to his dim-witted brother-in-law Donald Trump Junior’s email revelations.  

An amoral businessman in Trump Tower presents few dangers. An unprincipled businessman in the White House is a liability for the world.