Donald Trump’s Peter Principle
Any successful entrepreneur, any legitimately self-made man or woman, will tell you that one indispensable tool in their toolbox is their ability to identify and mimic what other successful people do. It is a lesson Donald Trump never learned because Trump is not a businessman, he is a business failure. Trump’s counterfeit success in business has come strictly from massive outside infusions of cash from his father and through leveraging criminal behavior.
Trump created nothing lasting and he followed no established principles of success. He took his father’s gifts, stole additional money, cheated others and boasted he was a success, and gullible people bought it. With the aid of white privilege, a complicit media, Russian election hacking, James Comey, misogyny and an array of ridiculous third party candidates, Donald Trump became president. Nobody was more shocked and surprised than he because he knew what half the country suspected: Donald Trump is a fraud from start to finish. That suspicion has been confirmed after four years of America’s most disastrously failed presidency.
So when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace interviewed Trump’s daughter-in-law and nepotistic advisor Lara Trump, she had some ‘splainin’ to do. For one thing, Wallace wanted to know why more than a thousand people, mostly without masks, were crammed together at the Republican National Convention last week. Lara’s response was predictable. The attendees were encouraged to follow government guidelines but chose not to. The convention was held in the open air. And what about those protestors, huh? Kellyanne Conway may be out the door, but her playbook is alive and well.
But the fact remains that the phase two coronavirus guidelines for Washington DC stipulate that there are to be no mass gatherings of more than fifty persons. So the convention was conceived with the intent to deliberately flout those rules, when more than a thousand chairs were put out on the south lawn of the White House stacked next to each other without so much as a nod to social distancing.
If you strip away the distractions and whataboutisms and arm-waving and finger-pointing and finger-wagging and blame-shifting, all that’s left is that Donald Trump failed to do what any neophyte entrepreneur would have done instinctively. He failed to look around and see how successful countries were fixing coronavirus and follow their lead.
I can’t speak definitively for Warren Buffett or Richard Branson, but I am confident had they been thrust into Donald Trump’s job in the middle of a pandemic, they would have looked to South Korea and Iceland and New Zealand and Germany and they would have done as they did. Trump failed because he’s not a businessman in any sense. He’s a spoiled, narcissistic, sociopathic, megalomaniacal failure. He’s history’s ultimate expression of the Peter Principle: he rose to the ultimate level of his incompetence, and a gullible population aided by stupidity and criminality helped him get there.
But our time is coming and that time is November. We and we alone hold the power to end this madness. Your life and the lives of your loved ones now depend on a Biden presidency, so vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris accordingly. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.