Trump's new government looks as though it is going to be made up almost entirely of people who have no clue about what government is but think it can be run like a business. The trouble is, the two are nothing like each other, and as a result, things could go horribly wrong very quickly for the Trump administration.
This is this transcript:
Does Trump understand government? It's a question that needs to be asked because I think the answer is that he doesn't.
Now let me be clear what I mean here. Government is not like business. Trump thinks he's the most amazing business person of all time, and he's willing to tell anyone who's willing to listen that that is the case.
But I don't believe that he is the best business person of all time. I don't think he's recruiting a team of great business people to support him. But I do believe that all the people that he is recruiting to run his government believe that it is just like another form of business and that they will run it in that way.
In his 2016 to 2020 administration, Trump employed a lot of people who were experienced in government and who understood government does not run like a business. As a consequence, they did, to some degree, save him and the USA from the worst that Trump had to offer. But this time, I don't think any such protections exist. To use the current parlance, the guardrails have been taken away. These people who are now in charge, they believe they are going to rule the world, and that is their intention.
But there are fundamental differences between what a government does and what a business does. Let me take a simple, straightforward example. If a government decides to sack a lot of people, and it looks as though it is Trump's intention to sack a great many people because he is talking, and Elon Musk is talking, about cutting the US federal budget by $2 trillion a year, which you can imagine is going to result in very large numbers of people who work for that government being out of employment. Those people do not disappear as a result.
If you run a business and sack people, they cease to be your responsibility once the payoff is concluded, and in the US, payoff settlements aren't good. But if you run a government, the people don't disappear because you sack them. They are still in your economy.
They still need to work, but there is now no work for them to do.
They still need to be fed, because you aren't giving them a death sentence.
Their children still need to be educated, but their parents are no longer paying tax to assist that process.
You still need to provide them with Medicare, if that is what they are dependent upon, and yet you've just eliminated the whole Medicare program that is there to assist them.
And you're creating a crisis as a consequence.
All of these realities are things that governments have to face that businesses don't.
So, it was entirely possible for Elon Musk to come into Twitter and sack 80 per cent of its staff and rename it X whilst doing so, and he has sort of got away with it - although we can see the consequences, that it became loss-making, and it haemorrhaged advertising, and now it is losing followers like fury. But he could sack those people, and they were no longer his responsibility. And that's how he views the world. He wants to be irresponsible with regard to those with whom he engages.
But the government can't do that. Because, as I say, people will still be there. And I don't believe that anyone inside the Trump government really understands that simple fundamental point. That the role of government is to actually manage the economy so that people can live - everyone can survive.
Now, let me just add a caveat here. I do know that Trump is going to try to export 11 million people from the US as part of his policy in government. He says that's what he's going to achieve. These are the so-called undocumented people working in the US at present, many of them undertaking household support tasks like child care and gardening and decorating and DIY, or working in similar shadow style businesses, but who nonetheless are providing essential support functions within the US economy, which Trump now wants to take away. Apart from the fact that he's going to upset vast numbers of wealthier people in the USA who employ these people to undertake the tasks I just mentioned, there is also the fact that he's actually got to find someone to take them.
Trump presumes that just like a private business, he can get rid of these people, and they are no longer his concern. But actually, that's not true. He can try to expel 11 million people from the USA, but that doesn't guarantee there's anywhere for them to go. Mexico might say, thank you very much, but these people are not coming back through here to wherever they came from.
And other people, of course, come from all over the world to the USA to work and are not necessarily documented. And so his task will be to persuade the rest of the world to take the 11 million people, and I very strongly suspect that many of them will have nowhere to go.
I don't believe that this is something he has thought about, because the small-minded, microeconomic attitude that he and his colleagues have towards government, which they think is like a business, has never thought through the fact that these people remain their problem until somebody else will take them, even if they manage to find 11 million people, round them up and try to force them out.
This is small-minded management, in other words. Well, not just small-minded, small mean-minded management, in other words. But that very bad form of business management, which appears to typify most of those on whom Trump is relying, is wholly unsuited for use by government.
And that is my point. The more that Trump tries to pretend that government can be run like a private equity operation, or like one of his businesses from the past, then we're going to see problems. The USA is going to see problems. The world is going to see problems. You cannot be president of the USA and recruit a team of people to support you, none of whom have real government experience, but all of whom think that the world can be run like a business and get away with it. You will crash government, and the USA with a crashed government is a prospect that I find pretty terrifying.
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I totally get your point.
But as you point out, the question then is about how they do their business? And the way they do their business is by all accounts shady.
We see this even when working here in the UK with locally based central government agencies like the Department of Levelling Up, Homes and Communities. When they are wiggling grant in front of us they actively encourage us to bend and break rules to achieve government objectives. Also the grant is paltry, and in doing such projects we bleed ourselves dry and end up at a financial loss and sweat the staff assets with more work.
Domain knowledge does not matter anymore – that is ‘woke’ apparently – we are too close to our clients and not objective enough, we are ‘too involved’ which of course eventually leads to the next stage of ‘there is nothing we can do’.
Trump has a choice really. He can let Musk rip on government and watch the consequences or he can take a more subtle route because after all the latter will enable the subterfuge (his not going to jail, his and his mates tax breaks and new income streams) to be maximised.
It could be that Musk ends up like Steve Bannon did – he was used to get Trump where he needed to be then Trump – like a lot of ‘user’ personalities – divests himself of certain individuals once their usefulness expires.
We will see won’t we?
Indeed……
Thank you, Richard.
Having worked with US banksters, I don’t think Trump is untypical.
One thing about the federal government, many, if not a majority, of its employees are to do with the national security apparatus. Some matters, e.g. education, are the preserve of states. The impact of the hatchet may (have to) be limited. If the US war machine is decimated, many people may not mind.
—Take you me for a sponge, my lord?
—Ay, sir, that soaks up the king’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the king best service in the end. He keeps them like an apple in the corner of his jaw — first mouthed, to be last swallowed. When he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you; and, sponge, you shall be dry again.
—I understand you not, my lord.
—I am glad of it. A knavish [sarcastic] speech sleeps in a foolish ear.
From Hamlet
the inner teacher couldn’t resist
yes, I did have to look it up
Act IV, scene II, lines 13–24; the inner teacher within me couldn’t resist completing the reference.
I have overquoted Shakespeare, perhaps, by including that last exchange between Rosencrantz and Hamelet – it’s extremely unlikely that Trump is capable of sarcasm that clever.
“These are the so-called undocumented people working in the US at present, many of them undertaking household support tasks like child care and gardening and decorating and DIY, or working in similar shadow style businesses, but who nonetheless are providing essential support functions within the US economy”
As i have stated many times, this will almost destroy the economy in Florida.
You informed my view
There is a great deal of sense in your argument, but with specific exceptions like Musk, I don’t believe the priority in this strategy (because it is worked out), is business.Trump is doing what the electors who voted for him want to see; payback to the Washington machine for the grief it has visited on Main Street, America since 2008; harsh and painful payback, that they can see – so they can trust it; because they really don’t trust Washington. Washington has to be seen to be hurting. I think we look for more complex explanations for all this from outside, than the very direct-minded American elector expects from this. They are content to clean up the mess that is caused by the demand, but only after there has been full payback; a very rough application of frontier redemption.
Thank you and well said, John.
The likes of Krystal Ball, Thomas Frank and Nathan Robinson echo.
“It could be that Musk ends up like Steve Bannon did – he was used to get Trump where he needed to be then Trump – like a lot of ‘user’ personalities – divests himself of certain individuals once their usefulness expires.”
This is exactly what will happen but Musk won’t go as quietly as Steve Bannon did.
With Brexit and Trump, Putin has brought down two of the leading Western players. He is winning a war that most in the West don’t even realise is being fought.
Thank you, Kim.
Do you think that the likes of Norman Tebbit (if you remember his speech at the 1992 Tory conference), “the bastards” who tormented John Major, Labour’s Peter Shore, and even, latterly, Thatcher were influenced by Putin?
Do you not think that the US national security apparatus and even some ambitious district attorneys would not have have brought down Trump over such treasonable behaviour?
I note, over the week-end and last week, references to Tulsi Gabbard being a Russian agent, including from Nikki Hailey. If that is the case, why is Gabbard able to carry on, especially under the Dixiecrats, as an army reserve lieutenant colonel?
This fellow must be laughing and probably stroking his cat: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14121597/Labour-Britains-national-security-MI6.html. He saw off Corbyn and May and had an associate appointed as chief of staff to Johnson.
According to the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island website, about 12 million people came through it to live in the US. These were mostly from Northern Europe and did all the menial jobs done by today’s immigrants. Now the descendants of these European immigrants want to kick out most recent immigrants. You can bet a large part of it is due to skin colour, and they don’t think that we are all human who have the same wants and desires as everyone else.
I agree, Richard. Trump without guardrails and without a competent cabinet will surely lead to wild over-reach and crisis. But note the Liz Truss lesson: Business and Finance will notice and insist in something different. It will play out differently in the US for legal reasons but does provide some grounds for rather qualified hope.
Maybe
Here we go again.
“Their children still need to be educated, but their parents are no longer paying tax to assist that process.”
But tax DOES NOT PAY for Govt services.
It might be the case that paying tax destroys the money previously “printed” by the government, and that then paves the way for the Govt to “print” more money, for more education, or a necessary project, or etc., etc., – without inflation. But why not say it? Otherwise an obvious nonsense is being said again and again.
But if that is the truth of the matter, a way to say it must be found, instead of this continuous duplicitous way of describing internal economics.