When Americans head to the polling stations and cast their votes on 8 November, they will be asked to decide which candidates for an array of posts – congressman, senator, judge, city counselor, mayor – we believe will serve us and represent our best interests. This year’s presidential race presents an interesting question, however. Are we ready to vote for someone who is a professional businessman?
On first hearing, that may sound appealing. We’d be getting someone efficient, right? Someone used to doing deals – someone who insists that the organization they oversee functions smoothly and efficiently, not chaotically and wastefully.
But as Monday night’s first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reminded us, in electing the latter, we’d be getting a businessman, but one who appears to possess a very distinct set of ideas about what being a businessman means and whose interests take priority. Perhaps what motivates Trump the businessman may not make him a wonderful president after all.
The first hint came relatively early on in Monday’s debate, when Clinton reminded the audience that Trump had been hoping for the housing market to collapse and that he had said in 2006 that he wished it would break down so that he could go and buy some properties and make some money.
“That’s called business, by the way,” Trump interjected, defending himself.
“Nine million people lost their jobs,” Clinton continued. “Five million people lost their homes. And $13tn in family wealth was wiped out.”
What she left unsaid, and didn’t need to say, was that that was the price of Trump’s “business” opportunity. Nor did Trump feel the need to defend himself from the implicit suggestion that he was indifferent to the connection between pain for the ordinary American citizen – pain that has amounted to a kind of national trauma that has contributed to his support – anywhere else in the evening. He left many viewers with a clear sense that “business is business”.
Indeed, late in the evening, he came right out and said as much. “My obligation right now is to do well for myself, my family, my employees, for my companies,” Trump said. “And that’s what I do.”
Trump’s order of priorities is clear. He and his family come first, then his employees, and then his companies. His country? Any not-for-profit causes that are close to his heart? In that statement, he showed the same tone-deafness that was on display when he equated his sacrifice of time and money building his company and amassing wealth to that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, Capt Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq. Meanwhile, bone spurs in his heels, which he noted subsequently “healed up” without requiring treatment, kept him out of the military during the Vietnam war years.
Even his companies and the people he does business with don’t always get great treatment, as those watching the debate were reminded on Monday evening.
“You have taken business bankruptcy six times. There are a lot of great businesspeople that have never taken bankruptcy once,” Clinton challenged Trump.
For his part, Trump can’t even agree with Clinton on the number of bankruptcies (he appears to consider three separate bankruptcies as a single event, according to debate fact-checkers), and shrugged the whole discussion off as a tempest in a teapot anyway.
The bankruptcy laws exist for a purpose, he noted. If you don’t like the laws – well, change them. “We used certain laws that are there,” he said. “I take advantage of the laws of the nation because I’m running a company.” And, you know, his obligation isn’t to keep paying his business creditors until he has no more money left at all in his bank account and he’s on the street, if there is a law that enables him to put that business into bankruptcy. Which, of course, there is. And that he has used on six occasions between 1990 and 2009.
Trump also bragged about being ahead of schedule and under budget. Part of the reason that the country’s own budget is in dire shape, he suggested, is that “we have people who have no idea as to what to do and how to buy”. He dismissed out of hand Clinton’s suggestions that he tramples on small vendors. “They did get paid a lot,” he insisted, but also hinted they took advantage of the laws of the nation, too, in some unspecified way. An architect who designed a clubhouse at one of Trump’s golf courses that Clinton said was immediately put into use? “Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump said. “Which our country should do, too,” he added, referring to the refusal to pay the amount owed for the work.
Do we want a president who picks and chooses which bills to pay?
Of course, for many of those watching the debate, the moment that the businessman-like approach by Trump caused their jaws to drop was during the discussion of his personal taxes.
Trump has said repeatedly that he plans to break with a 40-year tradition of presidential candidates and won’t release his tax returns while he’s being audited.
Translation: unless he changes his mind, we won’t be seeing those documents, with all the information they would provide about his actual income and its sources, his cash donations to charity (as opposed to simply donations of rounds of golf at his courses) and, of course, what percentage of his income actually is paid in taxes.
Leaving those questions unanswered left Clinton free to speculate on Monday evening. Maybe, she wondered, Trump isn’t as rich as he’d like us to believe; maybe he isn’t as charitable as he’d like us to think he is. In both cases, there has been plenty of media coverage, most recently about the Trump Foundation. Or perhaps, Clinton suggested, he is trying to cover up the fact that he has paid almost nothing in federal income tax.
“If he’s paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for health,” she added.
“That makes me smart,” said Trump, responding as businessman, and a goaded businessman. He went on to claim that “I have a tremendous income.”
Later, Trump argued that a businessman like himself was needed to take the lead to solve the country’s infrastructure problems, and he lamented the fact that the United States doesn’t have the money it needs to tackle the challenge because past administrations have squandered the resources. Clinton responded immediately. Maybe, she suggested, the money wasn’t there “because you haven’t paid any federal tax for a lot of years”.
While that was met with applause from the Hofstra University audience, Trump’s answer was greeted only with an isolated gasp or two. Had he done so, he suggested, “It would [have been] squandered too, believe me.”
Trump didn’t make a compelling case for electing a businessman as president come November – or at least not for electing this particular businessman, someone who seems to put a priority on serving himself rather than serving others, and enriching himself rather than sharing his riches.
As CEO of the Trump Organization, The Donald could fire his employees and had no bosses. As CEO of the United States of America, he can’t fire us; we’re simultaneously his shareholders and his bosses. We’d be hiring him, not vice versa. And it’s about how he can serve us, not how well he can look out for his own interests.
Does anything from Monday night’s debate show that he has grasped that yet?
