Was electing a non-politician as President just one huge mistake?
By John Welford
@indexer (4852)
Leicester, England
January 7, 2021 9:35am CST
The manner in which the Trump Presidency is coming to an end poses many questions for the future of Democracy in the United States.
One of those questions must be whether the election of a businessman rather than a career politician was such a brilliant idea in the first place.
As I recall, there was much talk at the time (prior to the 2016 election) about "draining the swamp" of corrupt politicians and putting someone in charge who was completely fresh to the world of politics and therefore a new broom that would sweep clean.
But it didn't turn out like that, did it?
I wonder if one reason for the horror show of the Trump Presidency - only held together by the actions of career politicians, it should be pointed out - was that someone who has offered him/herself to an electorate at a fairly early age and worked their way up to be able have a shot at the top job did at least start out with the notion that they were going to be of service to the people who elected them and would act on their behalf when representing their interests. They do not always hold on to those principles as time goes by - hence the potential for corruption - but at least they started out that way.
The same goes for those Presidents, such as Eisenhower, whose background was more military than political - service is at the heart of their attitude to life and it has a good chance of staying that way when they turn to politics.
But the world of business is not like that at all. In business, the aim is to make money, and most top businessmen are not remotely interested in providing service - unless they can get plenty of people to pay for it, that is. In other words, the world of business does not lend itself easily to political office, simply because the ethos behind the two worlds is so completely different.
With Trump, it was even worse than that, because he was not even very convincing as a businessman. He racked up six bankruptcies during his career and only stayed solvent thanks, at first, to huge sums of money donated by his father, and then to all sorts of dodgy dealings such as fiddling his tax and not paying his bills.
So the United States got the worst of both worlds - a corrupt businessman with no notion of public service. Let's hope they never make the same mistake again.
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2 responses
@indexer (4852)
• Leicester, England
7 Jan 21
I gather that his mistake with the casinos was that he opened two in Atlantic City, then decided that they were so profitable that he ought to open a third one. The problem was that there were not enough punters around to keep three casinos in business, so none of them was able to make a profit!
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