Donald J. Trump is first and foremost a businessman.
That instinct may or may not make him a good president. We’ll find out soon enough.
But what it does do is give the public a window into a decision-making process that would otherwise seem chaotic and random.
Businessmen and women are deal-makers, not ideologues. That has been Trump’s daily life for decades and will likely continue to be his life as president.
And indeed, Trump attempted at various times on the campaign trail to convey this, but he ultimately understood that bold statements, not wishy-washy sales pitches, energize voters.
Former Gov. Mario Cuomo once said, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Trump turns that on its head. On the trail, the hazy lyrics of the great American sing-along were replaced with hardnosed, boldfaced declarations. Now the edges have been sanded.
For example: On Tuesday, in an interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times, Trump backed off from a rally pledge to “lock her up” — a reference to Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information and the justice a Trump administration would mete out.
“I want to move forward, I don’t want to move back,” he said. “And I don’t want to hurt the Clintons. I really don’t. She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all.”
During the campaign, I interviewed hundreds of Trump supporters. Even those who chanted “lock her up” along with the candidate confessed they didn’t really believe he’d follow through to that extreme. They simply liked his unapologetic expressions of Clintonian criminality.
It wasn’t the only promise they didn’t expect him to keep. Many said they also didn’t buy his threats to waterboard terror suspects or his disputation of the science behind man-made climate change.
Yet when the news media was informed he wouldn’t prosecute Clinton after all, their collective hair caught on fire. Every news cast, tweet and report breathlessly claimed he was walking back one of the cornerstone pledges of his candidacy.
Which shows the challenge not just for his supporters but for the press: How do they cover this guy?
To both groups, one answer is: Prepare for the fact that he’s going to change his mind a lot. And I don’t mean simply jettisoning a campaign promise. I mean he’ll change his mind, probably often, during many decision-making processes. To a businessman like Trump, everything is negotiable; to those who aren’t expecting it, this will induce whiplash.
Reporters can’t freak out with every carom of the pinball. And the lesson for his opposition is: The “flip-flopper” moniker is probably not going to stick.
We are used to a politician making a statement or a promise and then either sticking to it or paying a political price. For some, the idea that they had no “core” — no bedrock principles, no non-negotiable terms — contributed mightily to their election losses. Think George H.W. Bush and his adamant “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge, or John Kerry’s “I actually did vote for the [war funding] before I voted against it.”
In all likelihood, Trump will make similarly adamant proclamations — and in all likelihood he’ll just as confidently walk them back; his supporters either get that or soon will; his detractors will remain infuriated.
What’s left to be seen is how Trump will handle those reactions. That is, in the business world, behaving like a businessman is par for the course. But not for presidents. When Trump does this in the Oval Office, he’s almost certainly not going to even realize what he’s doing is abnormal for the terrain. The press, the Democratic opposition and a segment of the public will be surprised — and Trump will be surprised by their surprise.
It’ll be an adjustment for all sides. During the campaign, Trump’s critics ridiculed the idea that he was running as an outsider. “Will we ever get to exploring how Donald Trump, who has trafficked with old-style politicians all his life, has gotten away with casting himself as the year’s premier outsider?” asked The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne less than a week before Election Day.
We’re about to get the answer.