Bad Business

Donald Trump likes to claim that his best qualification to be president is his great skill as a businessman. As with so many other things he says, there is no good reason to believe this. First, governing is vastly different from running a business. In particular, the management of debt in the real estate business, especially as practiced by Trump, is a recipe for disaster if practiced by a president. Second, there is the widely quoted fact that, if Trump had taken his initial stake in the business world and simply invested it passively in the stock market, he would have been vastly wealthier now than the most generous estimates of his actual worth. This is despite his exploitation of cheap labor from illegal immigrants, his string of bankruptcies that enriched him at the expense of his lenders and investors, and a long line of people who performed work for him that he simply refused to pay for at all.

But none of this is the best way to see how bad a businessman he truly is. For that, we should look at the worst decision he ever made, in terms of its impact on his business interests: his presidential campaign. Donald Trump went from being a wheeler and dealer in commercial real estate to becoming a brand. A good chunk of his money these days comes from deals for the use of his name. In both phases of his career, his reputation was essential. From the beginning of the primaries, however, Trump made the decision to base his campaign on the hatred and fear of Mexicans and Muslims, and his bigotry would spread to others soon enough. Right away, this hurt his business interests, as retailers began to refuse to carry his branded merchandise. In the Republican debates, however, he bullied his opponents, so they knew they could not criticize him for this without him lashing out and highlighting their own failures in this area. The pot did not dare call the kettle black. Hillary Clinton simply introduced American voters to the Khans and Alicia Machado, and let Trump do the rest to himself.

Considering what the Access Hollywood tape has done to Trump’s reputation, he should never, from a business standpoint, have run for president. Even if he did not know the tape existed, he should have known that his abuse of women would somehow become public. Will any businesswoman, or husband of father of a daughter want to do business with him ever again? More and more accusers have come forward as they realized that what happened to them was not their fault. Although it is not happening in such a public way, it stands to reason that former business partners who came out on the short end of a deal with Trump are also realizing that their experiences were not unique. They now know that he can not be trusted to deal with them fairly.

The campaign, particularly the debates, has also shown Trump’s lack of skill as a negotiator. After all, the debates are a kind of negotiation with the American people. You present your deal with the voters, your opponent presents hers, and your job is to persuade us to take your deal as the best option. There are many examples of Trump’s failures to do this in the debates, but one example from the third debate will suffice to make the point. Somehow, the topic of abortion did not come up until this final debate. It has been said that moderator Chris Wallace was trying to help Trump by bringing the subject up. Abortion rights are one of the trickiest cases to make for a liberal. One must somehow avoid the trap of being labeled a baby killer. But Trump played the weakest hand he had by going straight to late term abortions as his focus. Sure, the graphic details of these procedures are horrifying, but these are procedures that no woman or couple ever want to have. Their stories are heartbreaking, and command our sympathies, and several of these stories have now gone viral in the wake of the debate. The exchange in the debate solved a big problem for Hillary Clinton, allowing her to display her genuine passion for this issue and her sympathy for the people it affects. Trump, on the other hand, only showed that he had taken the discussion into an area where he was completely ignorant.

It is now all but certain that Donald Trump will lose the election. The appeal of his brand is largely based on his persona as a winner, but he will have lost the biggest prize he ever tried for. If we see the landslide that now seems so likely, this persona will take an even bigger hit. The damage this election could do to the Republican Party would be an even bigger problem for Trump’s brand in the future. It is not a stretch to say that almost any activity Donald Trump could have engaged in over the last year would have been better for his business interests than the way he chose to run for president.