"So you see I'm not naive
I just would like to believe
Ah what you tell me. . .
Just be for real"
Frederick Knight, 1976, "Be for Real," covered by Leonard Cohen, 1992
Donald Trump would have been a bad client in my brokerage business.
He would have been a bad merchant to have sold melons to in my youth.
He is a bad president.
I am disgusted by Trump. It isn't "derangement." It is rational and based on my experience in business. Some people are bad clients.
My disgust isn't partisan. I mostly vote for Democrats but I get along well with Republicans, and probably 60 percent of my brokerage clients were Republicans. What triggers me about Trump is his unreliability and gleeful dishonesty. He ruins relationships that took decades or centuries to build. As Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada put it, Trump's deals are signed in pencil.
I watch Trump with the mindset of my career as a financial advisor. Orders are given and received orally in that business. When a client heard my recommendation and said "yes," it became an obligation of mine to do as instructed. It is also an acknowledgement that we had settled on a course of action. It is pretty simple: We each do what we agreed to do. Business can take place quickly because of trust. A client who decided after the fact that they didn't want the deal, or lied about the deal, or made some pretext that the trade or course of action wasn't agreed to is an immediate career-ending problem for the advisor.
In my 30-year career there were about five such client incidents. The incidents were difficult or impossible to unwind; they brought investigations, reports, and weeks of hassles. They ended relationships.
Trump ended the Obama deal with Iran, wrote then abruptly ended the North American Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico and keeps changing it based on whim, changed the tariff deal on imports from every nation, and changed the terms of alliances. And, like a bad brokerage client reneging on a trade, Trump does this with a dishonest pretext, then blames the other party. Trump claims foreign nations deserve tariffs because they all hire slave labor. He claimed Venezuela was carrying out an armed invasion.
The USA is now understood to be profoundly dishonest and unreliable in its relations with others.
I remember how important trust was in my youthful melon business. I would deliver melons to Mr. Blunt, the owner-operator of Blunt's Ranch Market. I would tell him that I could bring him an amount of ripe melons from the next day's picking. He would say how many he could use, and to bring them. That set in motion mutual obligations. It meant he would not reject my load when I showed up the next day, having just bought some other melons from some deal that came available. It meant that I would not sell my day's picking of melons to someone else, leaving him short of melons. We had a relationship of trust. Trust was lubrication. Trust was a shock absorber.
Americans elected Trump with their eyes open. Even siloed consumers of conservative news had heard that Trump stiffed vendors. They heard him brag that he didn't pay taxes because he was smart. They had heard about his bankruptcies. My Republican friends who voted for Trump said: He's a scoundrel, but he is our scoundrel. Trump represented change, the end of rules, courtesies, and norms of trade and diplomacy, replacing them with an equilibrium set with the ongoing push and pull of power. Each individual, each business, each country grabs what it can. Trump was what America just enough Americans thought it needed: a sharp businessman.
Mr. Blunt treated me honorably. When he told me to bring melons, I brought the melons and he bought them. Ninety-nine point nine percent of my brokerage clients treated our verbal agreements honestly.
Trump is the very, very bad apple client. He is the client who novices are warned about. Bad apples get a reputation. In the long run, they get the very worst deals possible because people realize they are snakes.
Bad apples lose relationships of mutual benefit, but are not friendless. They find fellow-snakes.
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4 comments:
Essentially the United States made a deal with the devil. Some of us realized that from the start, others ignorantly fell into his trap. Now, we as a nation must experience the fruits of that bargain. No longer can any of us pretend we are the good guys, our innocence has been lost forever, at least my innocence has.
Healthy free market capitalism and democracy, or just living in a free society rely on social contracts of trust. My high school teacher once said that “locks are designed to keep honest people honest”. I think that’s true of laws and systems to make and enforce them too. Trust is implicit.
Trump’s biggest damage to the soul of our country isn’t that he has normalized and even glorified cruelty, greed, lies and contempt for the weak- as horrible as that is. It’s that his still-high approval ratings among the GOP faithful shows that he has lured a big part of our population (even supposedly people of faith) to celebrate his untrustworthiness as smart. Enforcing agreements is based on power and leverage , not mutual trust. Trickery and deceit are his tools.
But he has feet of clay, and his reign will end one way or another like every other lying and thieving megalomaniac in history, leaving a hollowed out world of needless suffering that will have a long tail for generations. Or setting us up for someone as bad or worse.
I don’t know whether to blame him for leading our collective moral decay, or to recognize him as a mirror of who we really are. I suspect our former allies are starting to think it’s the latter.
James Carville predicts that Trump will resign by April next year. He says it's because Trump is bored. Tired of the job. Perhaps. It might be because the new Congress impeached him again. Then Vance takes over and is a real shit-show. Anyway, that's what Carville said. Interesting prediction.
It’s not just relationships and trust he destroys. He had 60 cherry trees on public land cut down yesterday for his golf course expansion. They were given by the Japanese in 1912. While Department of Interior called them “invasive“ and unhealthy, observers found they appeared healthy. A lawsuit to stop it was pending but there was no injunction so he just went ahead and destroyed something we Washingtonians have enjoyed for over a century. He is a monster.
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