If America Were A Company Would You Keep This CEO?

In Washington, people struggling to come to terms with all the details of James Comey’s sacking and the claim that Donald Trump asked him to drop the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn have reached back to Watergate for comparison.

- John Micklethwait

But in many ways the more appropriate perspective is through a business lens: The immediate issue is whether a boss tried to halt embarrassing revelations about his company; the underlying one is whether he knows how to run it.

Of course, running a country is not the same as running a company. A president is both more constrained (by Congress, the press, and voters) and less so (chief executive officers, as a rule, can’t bomb their opponents). And Trump is not the first incoming president to have boasted of his corporate experience; remember George W. Bush, the first MBA president? But Bush had also run Texas. No president has tried to claim the mantle of CEO-in-chief as completely as Trump.

On the campaign trail, he cited his business experience all the time, contrasting his decisiveness, managerial skills, and shrewdness as a negotiator with the amateurish stumbles of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (not to mention several generations of U.S. trade representatives). Many of his first supporters knew him only as the archetypal “You’re fired” boss on The Apprentice. He rushed to bring in figures from the corporate world, luring Rex Tillerson from Exxon Mobil Corp. to run the State Department and a string of Wall Streeters. The stock market initially boomed. Trump’s message to business has been simple: Finally you have an executive in charge of the executive branch. “In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly,” he boasted to the New York Times shortly after his election. “There’s never been a case like this.”