“Managing” to make a mess
by Tom Sullivan
Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. Not up to the job?
Well, after all it is complicated. Like health care that way:
WASHINGTON — President Trump, meeting with the nation’s governors, conceded Monday that he had not been aware of the complexities of health care policy-making: “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
Well for one, Bernie Sanders knew. Via Raw Story:
“Well some of us who were sitting on the health education committee, who went to meeting after meeting after meeting, who heard from dozens of people, who stayed up night after night trying to figure out this thing, year—we got a clue,” Sanders told Anderson Cooper on Monday’s AC 360.
“When you provide health care in a nation of 300 million people, yeah, it is very, very complicated,” he continued. “And maybe now, maybe the president and some of the Republicans understand you can’t go beyond the rhetoric, ‘We’re going or repeal the Affordable Care Act, We’re going to repeal Obamacare and everything will be wonderful,’ a little bit more complicated than that.”
In further remarks, Trump told the governors, Obamacare is a “failed disaster.” So a little ambivalence there from the chief executive.
TRUMP: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” https://t.co/LFr422VHbq— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 27, 2017
Politico’s Michael Kruse spoke with several former Trump employees. Bruce Nobles ran Trump Shuttle airline and spoke of the problem Trump had with scaling up to the big-time:
“It surprised me how much of a family-type operation it was, instead of a business kind of orientation where there is a structure and there is a chain of command and there is delegation of authority and responsibility,” Nobles told a reporter from Newsday in the fall of 1989. “As the organization gets bigger, and it seems to be getting bigger all the time, he’ll have to do a better job of actually managing the place as opposed to making deals.”
That hasn’t happened, Nobles told Politico.
“I don’t think there’s anything of scale that he’s had his hands on that he hasn’t made a hash of,” says biographer Tim O’Brien. “He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”
Now Trump has his hands on the biggest organization in the country, and he’s “managing” the Oval Office the way he manages everything else: by impulse. One long sentence spells out Trump’s way:
In recent interviews, they recounted a shrewd, slipshod, charming, vengeful, thin-skinned, belligerent, hard-charging manager who was an impulsive hirer and a reluctant firer and surrounded himself with a small cadre of ardent loyalists; who solicited their advice but almost always ultimately went with his gut and did what he wanted; who kept his door open and expected others to do the same not because of a desire for transparency but due to his own insecurities and distrusting disposition; who fostered a frenetic, internally competitive, around-the-clock, stressful, wearying work environment in which he was a demanding, disorienting mixture of hands-on and hands-off—a hesitant delegator and an intermittent micromanager who favored fast-twitch wins over long-term follow-through, promotion over process and intuition over deliberation.
His loyalists think behind his disorienting style he’s playing shrewd, eleventy-dimensional chess.
TRUMP: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” https://t.co/LFr422VHbq— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 27, 2017
Right.