CLEVELAND — Donald Trump’s most famous television catchphrase is “you’re fired.”
“This year, we get to fire the politicians,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night. “And who better to let the politicians know ‘you’re fired’ than Donald Trump?”
But when it comes to politics and his personal inner circle, “you’re fired” often seems to be the furthest thing from Trump’s lips.
Hours before Scott spoke to the Republican delegates, a woman named Meredith McIver issued a statement accepting responsibility for the convention’s biggest blunder — paragraphs from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic convention speech appearing in Melania Trump’s remarks to the GOP Monday.
If this were “The Apprentice,” the axe surely would have fallen. But a presidential campaign?
“Yesterday, I offered my resignation to Mr. Trump and the Trump family, but they rejected it. Mr. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow from these experiences,” said in a statement bearing Trump’s company letterhead.
Trump had previously tweeted that he liked the attention his wife’s speech had received, saying all publicity is good publicity, which genuinely does seem to be his philosophy in dealing with the media. So maybe Trump didn’t view it as a hanging offense in any event.
Nevertheless, Trump has a history of sparing people who would otherwise be canned. Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski survived a simple battery charge and a firestorm of criticism over his treatment of a female reporter attempting to ask the candidate a question.
Michael Cohen is still Trump’s lawyer after rape comments that could have become a Todd Akin moment for the Republican front-runner. You can find him on television rebuking Ted Cruz for his non-endorsement.
One of the reasons Trump had such an awkward vice presidential rollout and reportedly waffled on his choice of Mike Pence was that he didn’t want to tell early supporters Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich no.
Trump’s inner circle consists of his children and many longtime loyalists who, like Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” are practically adopted into the family. For all his pretense of being a ruthless, results-driven champion of meritocracy, he clearly values loyalty above all else.
Trump has tried to staff his campaign with people he can trust. When he has brought people with more experience from the outside and concluded they had not truly bought into what he was doing or had other agendas, they were the ones who heard “you’re fired.”
How would this play in the White House? Ronald Reagan was hesitant for fire people who had been loyal to him in the past even when it was clearly in his best interest to do so. On the one hand, his presidency turned out fine — the last unambiguous White House success story. On the other, the practice caused him a lot of avoidable headaches, especially in his second term.
So much of Trump’s appeal is based on his management skills. What he lacks in experience in government or policy he supposedly makes up for in his experience running large organizations successfully. Some of those management practices, however, are pretty unorthodox.
Unlike Mitt Romney, maybe he really doesn’t like firing people.
