Can a reality-TV president create a new U.S. reality that pretends death, despair don't exist?
Donald Trump has been here before. At the dawn of the 2000s, the Manhattan real estate developer and short-fingered vulgarian was literally — as the New York Times would later document — the worst businessman in America, having lost more than $1 billion in one 10-year period.
But then, to paraphrase Dylan, you didn’t need an accountant to see which way the bottom line was blowing. The man had literally bankrupted casinos, the closest thing we have to a license to print money. And the banks had made him sell his airline and his yacht. Or you could just check out the late-night infomercial stuff Trump was trying to foist on consumers — Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and a Trump University where presumably you, too, could learn how to blow through a billion.
But rather than face reality, Donald Trump just invented a new one, with the help of a TV guru named Mark Burnett. To the millions of future voters who’d never read the Wall Street Journal but avidly watched NBC’s The Apprentice once it debuted in 2003, the man that banks wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole played America’s shrewdest CEO and judged the business savvy of his competitors as if his own six business bankruptcies had never happened.
Now, with America in its worst crisis since the Civil War, with both a deadly pandemic and a second Great Depression, the man who rode that wave of as-seen-on-TV reality all the way to the White House is looking to pull off his greatest stunt yet. POTUS 45 hopes that by pretending he’s a wartime president at the helm of the great American economic and spiritual comeback, no one will notice the rising death counts or the ever-longer lines at food banks.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/president-trump-coronavirus-plan-ignore-death-unemployment-20200510.html
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and his terrible management style.
granted there had to be drama created for the sake of the show, but still, much of the interaction with donnie showed that he was a really lousy person to work for.
first, the obligatory deference to the chief. it was pretty obvious early on that this was essentially scripted. not ever word, but it became obvious that everyone who talked to donnie basically led and left with effusive praise at what an honor it is to have this opportunity, how he's such a great and successful businessman, etc.
anyone who knows anything about management knows that this is a big red flag. good managers are all about the team. good managers react to praise by saying, i had a great team, they deserve the credit. they're implicitly (and privately) boasting that they put that good team together, but publicly, they give people lots of praise. cynically, because giving praise is cheaper than better pay, but also because it helps motivate people.
second, he only cared about the result, however sloppily it was arrived at. one team could have a better product, better marketing, better customer service and satisfaction, and better organization. the other team could have a disaster, but they make one phone call to a rich friend who bails them out by single-handedly buying enough to put them over the top, well, guess who donnie deems the winner.
in the real world, i'm hiring the better manager as a project manager. i might take on the guy with the rich friend as a sales guy on a commission basis, but i'm not putting them in charge of anything.
third, he created conflict and drama, which is death to a team. again, some allowances have to be made for tv, but this was over the top, and there are ways to producers could have stoked conflict without showing donnie as the one baiting them. he consistently looked for people who would criticize and run down others, including teammates, and even ridicule people who would say nice things about their colleagues. he only wanted aggressive, abusive alpha personalities and clearly loathed everyone else.
he was a clearly a toxic manager, i wouldn't want to work for him or have him on my team in any capacity.
yet others somehow saw that same show and thought he was awesome.
