IN 2016, a few months before Donald Trump was elected president, I wrote a column about his long history as a mismanager that cited this chestnut from his book Crippled America: I realised that America doesn’t need more ‘all-talk, no-action’ politicians running things. It needs smart businesspeople who understand how to manage. We don’t need more political rhetoric – we need more common sense. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ — but if it is broke, let’s stop talking about it and fix it. I know how to fix it.
Trump’s book, like all his non-fiction works of fiction, was a self-promotional exercise at odds with his true history as an inept bungler. The point of my column back then was that Trump was campaigning for a job that was likely to elude him, regardless of how voters felt about him. Nothing in his past had prepared him for the presidency or for effectively managing a bureaucracy as complex, influential and sprawling as the federal government.
