As President Trump manages his latest crises, he is turning to strategies from his tumultuous business career: rely on family and a few trusted advisers, demand absolute loyalty from those beyond the inner circle, threaten opponents with legal action, and insist on bare-bones briefings.
.. His threats — such as tweeting that fired FBI Director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” — have often backfired.
.. “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience”
.. Trump’s view of Washington is rooted in deep distrust of government authority, stemming from the day in 1973 when the Justice Department sued him and his father for racial bias
.. When judges suspended his entry ban that mostly affected Muslim travelers and immigrants, he attacked judges and vowed to “see you in court,” just as he had during his business career.
.. Trump often deployed a tactic of telling others that he was taping their conversations and monitoring their work, and threatening to file lawsuits or to reduce payments owed to contractors. By suggesting that he had secretly recorded his dinner conversation with Comey, Trump apparently hoped to prevent the fired FBI director from speaking negatively about him.
.. Flynn’s firing took 18 days from the time that acting attorney general Sally Yates warned White House Counsel Donald McGahn that Flynn had compromised himself
.. McGahn is the nephew of Patrick “Paddy” McGahn, who once was Trump’s lawyer.
.. Paddy McGahn “was one of the few people that just didn’t care and would say anything to Trump,” O’Donnell said in a telephone interview. “He was a fixer, getting out in front of things, issues that might come, before they turned into problems.”
.. A former White House lawyer who has spoken to McGahn said the counsel ill served the president if he did not make it sound like an emergency.
.. there are concerns that McGahn, unlike his uncle, was reluctant to stand up to Trump.
.. He often paired the lawsuits with verbal vitriol, seeking to intimidate those he sued. While Trump keeps up the vitriol in the White House with his use of Twitter
Costa: Ivanka and Jared Kushner Operate with ‘Ruthlessness’
“No one wants to go against Jared or Ivanka,” Costa said. “Now you have Ivanka Trump inside of the West Wing
.. “They really operate quietly but with some ruthlessness around the administration, having their fingerprints on all aspects of foreign, diplomatic relations, domestic policy,” Costa said.
.. “Ivanka Trump … is trying to reach out to a lot of women … who are not necessarily conservative … and that includes the leadership of Planned Parenthood,” Costa said.
.. “After spending two years on the campaign trail talking about China and how he’s going to put it to ‘em … there’s not a coherent vision right now for what exactly this admin wants to do on China and on trade,” Costa said. “You have Cohn and his group at the National Economic Council, and they’ve been clashing with [economic populist Peter] Navarro.”
.. “There’s a sense within the West Wing … that at the end of the day Trump could purge everyone — as he has in the past in his businesses and his campaign — but Jared and Ivanka will survive anything,” he said.
“If they’re always going to be there, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of that.”
Trump’s Italian Prototype
But the most important – and the most worrying – qualities they share is an ability to substitute salesmanship for substance, a willingness to tell bald-faced lies in pursuit of publicity and advantage, and an eagerness to intimidate critics into silence.
Berlusconi’s policy platforms, even his fundamental ideology, have always lacked consistency. During his successful campaigns, he said whatever it took to win votes; during his three terms in office, he used the same tactic to form coalitions. His only agenda was to protect or advance his own business interests.
.. Berlusconi’s greatest successes – especially during his 2001-2006 and 2008-2011 terms (he also served in 1994-1995) – lay in the manipulation of media and public opinion.
.. He somehow lulled Italians into believing that all was well in their economy and society, even in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, when plainly it was not. Under his leadership, Italy lost many years when its government should have been pursuing critical reforms.
.. How did Berlusconi achieve this? For the most part, he used the joke, the lie, and the smile. When that didn’t work, he resorted to bullying, including through libel suits.
.. In fact, few media tycoons – Berlusconi owns Italy’s main commercial television channels and several daily newspapers (either directly or through his family) – have ever been as freewheeling in their use of libel litigation to silence journalists and other critics.
.. (Full disclosure: As Editor of The Economist, I was the target of two libel suits by Berlusconi.)
.. All of these tactics are in Trump’s inventory. Trump is aggressive with his opponents, especially in the media. Throughout his business career, he has frequently invoked libel laws. If he wins the presidency, he has said, he will seek to control media criticism. And yet his essential message is optimistic, delivered with a joke and a big smile.
.. What is important is that both Trump and Berlusconi are ruthless and willing to resort to any means to achieve their (self-serving) ends.
The Lesson of Nordstrom: Do Business With the Trumps or Else
In sum, Nordstrom made a business decision not to do business with the president’s daughter because her clothing line was not selling well, and the president used his official position to attack the company for this decision.
.. The president’s tweet — posted on his personal account and then re-sent from his White House account — is an act of intimidation.
.. This is not the way free markets work, particularly in the United States. We fought a revolution in part against the mercantilism that prevailed in Britain, where the king and members of Parliament played favorites and people who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the government did business with companies in which powerful politicians had an interest (the South Sea Company and the East India Company were the two most notorious examples). Edmund Burke and Adam Smith railed against this type of corrupt relationship between business and government in Britain; similarly, the founders of our country did not want that type of abuse of power going on here.
The modern-day Tea Party movement arose in the aftermath of the Great Recession, a reaction to the perception that politicians were playing favorites in bailing out Wall Street banks and auto companies. The Republican Party for years has made a very strong case for an economy in which market actors make their own decisions free of government interference.