By Al Bienenfeld
Donald Trump is one of the most unique public figures in our nation’s history. He is completely misunderstood by just about everyone in the media, left or right, and most of the political class.
There is good reason for this. Educated media elites and Washington “lifers” have never run a large business. They have no understanding or appreciation of the skill set required to oversee large groups of people with billion-dollar budgets for which business leaders are personally responsible. You do not have to be competent to survive in the media. The staff at CNN is proof of this. If the government blows a budget, just borrow or print more money. In the private sector, failure is not an option. You will lose your job or go broke.
Trump Enterprises employs over 22,000 people and has developed properties worldwide. I went online and viewed 50 world-class buildings around the globe. While Donald Trump has had his failures – bankruptcy in the 1990s, failed gaming enterprises in Atlantic City – he is still an overwhelming success.
We have an active workforce (my own term) of about 160 million people (half of our 320 million population). This includes those collecting a paycheck and those drawing an unemployment check. This is what is the unemployment number commonly used is based on, but it excludes those who have dropped out of the workforce. Based on this, President Trump is in the top 1/800 of 1 percent. If you consider the population as a whole, the ratio is 1/1600 of 1 percent. These are staggering proportions.
The office of the presidency is an executive position. It is a position of management, the foremost in our country and probably the world. To succeed, one must have serious expertise with large numbers of employees and budgets. It was a wretched experiment hiring someone with no experience in either, between 2009 and 2017. The results bear out the assertion.
President Trump was willing to consider Mitt Romney for secretary of state despite his very poor behavior toward Mr. Trump during the campaign. Why? Because he wanted the best man for the job. He was willing to set aside his personal feelings to get the best results possible for the American people. Can anyone imagine a petty bureaucrat like Barack Obama doing such a thing?
Trump’s selection of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state had been opposed by Sens. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla., John McCain, R-Ariz., and other establishment Republicans, as well as the vast majority of the left. I define the left as the Democratic Socialist Party. Moderates with a sense of reason, like Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., are quickly disappearing. The Tillerson decision was praised by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State James Baker and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The source of Tillerson’s opposition was his non-political outsider background, his commercial success and strong relationship with Vladimir Putin. The ability to communicate personally with Putin is an asset, given current world affairs. Syria and Crimea are gone. There is no reasonable way to change that. It should have not been allowed to happen. American weakness invited Russian aggression. The cost to remedy this is not worth the expense: war (physical or otherwise) with Russia to displace them either directly or by proxy, and likewise in Syria. If we can contain Syria’s Assad, contain and finally stop the fighting causing Islamic immigration to Europe and America, we win. We do not need to remove Assad as desirable as that may appear to be.
Remember the result of our Libyan intervention. We had their ruler on a leash, but now have a failed terror state. We do need to eliminate ISIS, the Islamic State. In this, the U.S. and the Russians have a common interest. ISIS’ defeat will help reduce the migration issue.
Iran is the biggest problem in the Middle East. Tehran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the region. Without their support, Assad would have fallen. Russia followed Iran into Syria. The Syrian people have the right to self-determination whether at the ballot box or on the field of battle. Iran took that right away from them. While some would like to restore that right, I see no cost-to-benefit justification for expending American life and treasure in this pursuit. We need to work at undermining Iran. It may be possible to enlist Russia in containment from their end, while we undermine from ours, thus moving closer to destabilization of the terror state.
President Trump’s overall policies are very reminiscent of the Reagan era. Strong national defense, strong economy and a projection of American power. His outreach to Mikhail Gorbachev is not unlike what Trump had hoped to do with Putin. Does anyone really believe that Gorbachev became the head of the Soviet Union by being a nice guy?
What we are seeing in President Trump is a resolute leader with no limitation in his thought process. He acts like a businessman, pragmatic, a gatherer of information, strategic in his thinking and relentless in his pursuit of success both in domestic and foreign policy. Isn’t this what we want?
Al Bienenfeld is a semi-retired builder/developer and the author of “The Logic of the Rational Mind,” World Ahead Press.