America isn’t finished paying for Trump’s incompetence

Trump has always put himself first, whether he’s in the Oval Office, on the golf course, or sitting in his corner office in Trump Tower. — AP

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.