The leadership skill of Donald J Trump

The leadership skill of Donald J Trump

Opposing Donald Trump needs us all to notice his presidency in a way which is less exhausting and more potent. Here’s how and why we might do that.

I started thinking this way because I help teach a class at business school on reflective practice. The class helps students see situations in new ways. You need reflection when you’ve been banging your head against a brick wall. You know you should try something different – but what?

Two years ago this month Donald Trump became the Republican presidential candidate. He’s been my brick wall. He makes my ordinary life exhausting. I should reflect, then.

I also work as a coach, and bring to that work some expertise in leadership. From time to time my coachee and I have had some success coping purposefully with an exhausting, perhaps erratic boss. So it’s time to coach myself.

My suggestion is that we analyse Trump’s leadership as a distracting, exhausting dance with three steps: roulette, fatigue and smoke. This analysis might help when he makes his next crazy move, probably in less than twenty-four hours. As the news hits ask: where is my attention? What am I noticing – roulette, fatigue or smoke? What am I forgetting to notice? What’s happening to my energy levels?

Roulette

Casinos were the key to the universe which Donald Trump found in a parked car. In December 2016 I read ‘The Art of the Deal’. His first attempts to get rich were in property and hotels, but the real deal was the far greater profitability of casinos. Sell someone a condominium and stiff them once; but lure them into a casino and the pleasure is endless.

In the book Trump stresses that he would never be so foolish as to be a casino gambler himself. His delight is to win at the expense of punters who imagine that he is on their side.

He has applied this political lesson with stupendous effect. Tax cuts for the well-off, while trying to slash health care? Why not? Casino-owners make sure that punters hear the roar of pay-outs going to somebody else; the racket convinces punters that soon it will be their turn. (Historically, American voting machines bore a resemblance to slot machines.)

There’s more: he’s turned policy into a roulette wheel. The shiny ball of his next utterance or decision captures our attention as it lurches unpredictably towards different positions. Why accuse him of being inconsistent, when the point of a roulette wheel is inconsistency?

He’s playing Russian roulette, of course. Where the ball stops determines who gets attacked: sick people, Muslims, black people most days, women, migrant families, China, Iran, Mexico, Canada. Since this roulette wheel is wired up to the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal, there is no escaping the possibility of our own destruction.

This dance step confronts us with a terrifying dilemma: to watch out of fear and concern, despite knowing that our gaze is what he seeks; or to turn away, to not care about the fate of hugely vulnerable groups, or indeed our own fate. That may be the point of the Melania jacket: to suggest that these are our only choices.

But the dilemma is false. We have to watch Trump like a hawk, but more perceptively than he wants. The roulette wheel transfixes us in order to exhaust us.

Fatigue

Irène Némirovsky’s novel ‘Suite Française’ begins like this, in June 1940:

Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war was far away. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn't sleep - the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced from a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, 'Is it an air raid?'

... The night before - Monday 3 June - bombs had fallen on Paris for the first time since the beginning of the war. Yet everyone remained calm. Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them.

Némirovsky did not live to complete her work, but some of her notes survived. She observed:

Which scenes deserve to be passed on for posterity? (1) Waiting in queues at dawn. (2) The arrival of the Germans. (3) The killings and shooting of hostages much less than the indifference of the people.

Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, echoed her point. The preface to his history of the holocaust concludes by quoting Rabbi Hugo Gryn: the holocaust depended most of all ‘upon the indifference of bystanders in every land’.

What fear fails to achieve, it can delegate to indifference; but fatigue does the job just as well. It takes effort to open my eyes, to notice reality, to construct what it means. Re-reading Némirovsky’s opening again, it is full of sleep and fatigue, physical and allegorical.

I think about riding in a car when, for no very obvious reason, perhaps the vehicle’s motion or the flashing of sun on glass, my eyes cannot stop shutting. A hypnotic fatigue is the second step of Trump’s dance. Differentiating night from day, the idea of punters taking a break – these things are anathema to casino owners.

To escape Trump’s false dilemma (‘watch me or don’t care’), we need to create new, non-exhausting, ways of watching him. Like deep sea divers or extreme fire-fighters we might need to operate in buddy pairs, two weeks on, two weeks off: one fortnight fiercely vigilant, reacting, organising and communicating; the following fortnight as Trump-free as possible, ‘off grid’ if need be, to detox and regenerate.

Smoke

The roulette wheel is random, unpredictable. Is that all? Are we watching purely attention-seeking behaviour? Or are there entropies which, if one looks away from the shiny ball and overcomes fatigue, are always present, always calmly increasing, always pointing in one direction, like smoke rising silently in still air above a chaotic battlefield? Do some things Trumpian always move in one direction?

Money. The bank balances, side deals, loans and tax breaks of the tax-not-disclosed Trumpocracy – very likely these are increasing, including in plain view through tax breaks for the wealthy. Part of the smoke on the horizon is eighteen-wheelers trucking through the desert with loot.

Damage to the environment – the smoke of coal, dirty fuel, wild fires, shale extraction, the raping of air, sea and land.

The weakening of institutions of justice, democracy or international comity – smoke rising from a lot of Reichstags. ‘He could do eight years,’ people say. Only eight? Really? What, he’ll stop out of respect for the law?

The ‘right to kill’ president

Election gave Donald Trump something which no TV show could, nor any hotel empire however ritzy: the power to kill people. Dropping the ‘mother of all bombs’ scratches an itch which the mother of all golf courses doesn’t touch.

In the United Kingdom we have invited Trump to visit on Friday 13 July. Silly us. But since we occupy that position, we know that Trump is not interested in our respect.

It’s obvious whose respect he does crave – lethal autocrats like Putin and Kim. But the mutual regard of equals has to be earned: in this case by body count. We should expect the smoke of corpses.

The retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy signals the start of a ‘right to life’ war like no other. But viewed through the lens of this article, abortion is merely an excitingly violent slot in the roulette wheel of policy. Trump’s manifest contempt for the weak or disabled makes laughable the idea of him respecting as a foetus that which he will mock as an adult. No ‘right to life’ president, he is a ‘right to kill’ president. A side order of torture will go down nicely.

To be fair, he did tell us this two and a half years ago. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he said to an overflow crowd in the Sioux Centre, Iowa[1].

Conclusion

In 1942, 13 July fell on a Monday – the day of Némirovsky’s arrest. She was a Russian Jew who had been baptised. On that day she wrote:

My dearest love, for the moment I am at the police station where I ate some blackcurrants and redcurrants while waiting for them to come and get me. It is most important to stay calm, I believe it won’t be for very long. I thought we could also ask Caillaux and Father Dimnet for help what. What do you think?

I shower my darling daughters with kisses, tell Denise to be good and sensible … You are in my heart, as well as Babet, may the good Lord protect you. As for me, I feel calm and strong.

If you can send me anything, I think my second pair of glasses are in the other suitcase (in the wallet). Books please, and also if possible a bit of salted butter. Goodbye my love!

Némirovsky never saw her family again. On 16 July, she was sent to the concentration camp at Pithiviers, and deported to Auschwitz the next day. She died on 17 August 1942. By November her husband had also been gassed at Auschwitz. ‘Suite Française’ survived through her children.

I call my coaching business ‘Maslow’s Attic’, an allusion to Maslow’s concept of self-actualisation – the fulfilment of unique potential. I help my clients construct ‘realistic dreams’. But what if a realistic dream includes a body count? “How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden ... he goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss,” Trump said of Kim. “It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one.”[2] Not any old body count, of course; anything Trumpian needs to be one of the greatest.

The casino leadership model is uncommon for good reason. Trump may think that owning casinos – like winning trade wars – is a piece of cake; but they account for five of his six bankruptcies[3]. We the people are not roulette fodder: we are leaders too. If we think smarter, notice better and take time off to recharge our vision and our energy, together we will find a way to consign this presidency to the septic tank of history.

Douglas Board is an executive coach, a satiric novelist and a management writer. He has a doctorate in the selection of people for senior roles. His novelette ‘The Rats: A White House Satire’ is free to download or listen at www.the-rats-satire.com

[1] Washington Post January 2016: www.tinyurl.com/WP23jan16

[2] Washington Post June 2018: www.tinyurl.com/WP15jun18

[3] Washington Post September 2016: www.tinyurl.com/WPfactcheck

 



Tricia Sibbons she/her

Strategy & Relationships Africa-UK Partnerships Creative Sectors Innovation Civil Society Artivists Human Rights

5y

A really helpful call to look carefully, step up in time, build unity against those who would divide us for their own ends.

Christina Patterson

Journalist, author, broadcaster, executive and team coach (ACC)

5y

Excellent piece. As Douglas so eloquently says, indifference is a luxury we cannot afford.

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