President Trump campaigned on running the country like a business. But running it like his family business is causing political problems.
Trump managed his personal brand and family real estate development business with his children and a small cadre of loyalists as subordinates. His style made him very wealthy. It even proved somewhat effective in the campaign. But in the White House, keeping West Wing staff and the relevant Cabinet agencies out of the loop risks undermining confidence in his leadership and threatens to derail his agenda.
“He is failing to learn the skills that are needed to be an effective president, and he is continuing to operate as he always has,” said Lara M. Brown, associate professor and interim director of the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University.
Brown said that not enough scrutiny was paid during the 2016 campaign to whether Trump’s business success would translate to government.
“When you develop a project — putting together a hotel or a golf resort — everything related to that project is contained within that project,” she said. “That’s not true in politics: Everything in politics relates to everything else.”
Trump on Friday conceded that he kept his White House staff, and Vice President Mike Pence, in the dark regarding his firing of FBI Director James Comey.
In a series of Twitter posts, the president said that he’s a busy executive who sometimes moves too fast to give advisers, including his senior communications personnel, a heads up as to his plans or reasons for acting.
Republicans in Washington who support Trump, and believe that Comey’s firing was entirely defensible, say that the president mismanaged the affair from the beginning. The president’s excuse that he moves too quickly to loop in his advisers isn’t cutting it.
“I want him to succeed,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a Republican operative who worked in the George W. Bush White House. “But in order to succeed you need to make sure you’re in unison with your staff in terms of messaging.”
Schlapp added that she is sympathetic to Trump’s frustration with the periodic leaks that come from his administration. But she said that the president will continue to stumble if he doesn’t put his top aides in a position to help him.
“The communications team is such an integral part of delivering the president’s message,” she said. “Process matters, and you have to get organized.”
Trump dismissed Comey as FBI director on Tuesday.
At the time, the White House communications office said the president acted on the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who established grounds for Comey’s removal in a memorandum prepared for the Oval Office.
Trump’s pink-slip letter to Comey seemed to support that narrative, and was used over the next few days to explain the president’s actions to reporters by Pence and top White House aides, including press secretary Sean Spicer and deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Then Trump dropped a bombshell during a subsequent interview with NBC News.
He told anchor Lester Holt that, with the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election that could implicate him and his campaign, he had already decided to fire Comey — before receiving the Rosenstein memo.
Trump said he would have removed him regardless of the Justice Department’s findings, contradicting what Pence and senior staff had said publicly for the previous 48 hours.
Friday morning, Trump added to the firestorm, insinuating that he had wiretapped Comey during their private meetings and might out him in some manner, and admitting that his top aides aren’t reliable purveyors of information because he doesn’t always tell them what’s going on.
Indeed, if taken literally, Trump said that it was for this reason that he is considering canceling the daily press briefing.
“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” Trump tweeted. “…Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”
