No Loss for Words

Every four years America conducts the most expensive job interview in the world.

The 2028 presidential election may sound like it’s still a long way off. It isn’t. Once we get through the midterm elections this fall, the next presidential campaign will begin taking shape almost immediately. Candidates will start testing messages, courting donors, building organizations and introducing themselves to the American people. Before they spend the next two years telling us why they deserve the job, maybe this is a good time for us—the people doing the hiring—to decide what qualifications we’re looking for.

And I’m beginning to wonder whether we ask the right questions.

We ask presidential candidates where they stand on abortion, taxes, immigration, guns, climate change, foreign policy, Social Security and a hundred other issues. Republicans want to know whether the candidate is conservative enough. Democrats want to know whether theirs is progressive enough. Interest groups have scorecards. Donors have priorities. Activists have litmus tests.

But the person we elect will become the chief executive of the United States.

Maybe somewhere along the way we ought to ask:

What have you actually run?

That question seems almost embarrassingly simple.

Yet we have spent most of my lifetime electing professional politicians to an executive position unlike any other on earth.

Why This Matters

The President of the United States is responsible for an executive branch that spends trillions of dollars, employs millions of people directly and indirectly, negotiates with allies and adversaries, oversees the military, responds to disasters, enforces federal law and makes decisions that can affect American lives for generations.

This isn’t an honorary position.

It isn’t a reward for giving the best speech.

And it shouldn’t be the final promotion in a political career.

We ought to care whether the person asking for the job has demonstrated some ability to do the job.

Donald Trump, for all his faults, forced me to think differently about that.

I don’t believe America needs another Donald Trump.

I do believe America should learn something from having elected him.

The Professional Political Résumé

For most of modern history, we have treated government experience as one of the principal qualifications for the presidency.

A candidate served in the House.

Then the Senate.

Maybe became governor.

Perhaps served as vice president.

He accumulated twenty or thirty years in public life and eventually we were told that all that experience made him ready for the Oval Office.

Maybe.

But experience doing what?

Political professionals become very good at politics. They learn how to raise money, assemble coalitions, make speeches, win elections, work committees, negotiate legislation and satisfy constituencies.

Those are useful skills.

But they aren’t the same skills required to run the largest, most consequential  organizations in the world.

A senator doesn’t have to make payroll.

Congress can spend more money than it collects year after year and call the result a budget.

A business owner who tries that long enough gets introduced to his banker under less pleasant circumstances.

Political professionals spend enormous amounts of money, but almost none of it belongs to them. They make decisions affecting businesses they have never operated and employees they have never hired.

And when a government program fails?

Nobody goes broke.

Nobody loses the house.

Nobody tells the family that the business is gone because Dad made the wrong decision.

They hold a hearing.

Then they appropriate some more money.

That is a very different education from the education received by someone whose mistakes have consequences.

Failure Is Experience Too

One criticism of Donald Trump has always been that some of his business ventures failed.

That’s true.

But I’m not sure failure is always the disqualification we pretend it is.

I’ve been in business. Failure teaches things success never gets around to mentioning.

You hire the wrong person.

You misjudge the market.

You borrow too much.

You trust somebody you shouldn’t have trusted.

You make a deal that looked wonderful on paper and discover reality forgot to read the proposal.

Then you live with it.

Trump has had spectacular successes and spectacular failures. Whatever else we think of him, he has operated in an environment where decisions have consequences.

That matters.

I’d like presidential candidates to be able to answer a question we rarely ask:

Tell me about something you really screwed up. What did it cost you, and what did you learn?

I’d learn more from that answer than from another rehearsed speech about their vision for America.

The Pragmatist

Years ago I came across a piece falsely attributed to Charles Krauthammer arguing that Trump was neither really liberal nor conservative, but a pragmatist.

Krauthammer didn’t write it. The attribution was bogus.

But the thought stuck with me.

A pragmatist sees a problem and asks how to solve it.

Not: What is the Republican solution?

Not: What is the Democratic solution?

What works?

The bogus essay argued that immigration isn’t fundamentally a Republican or Democratic problem. Neither are trade, debt or economic decline. They are American problems requiring workable solutions.

That idea is bigger than Donald Trump.

In fact, I hope it eventually outlives him.

One of the frustrations of modern politics is that ideology too often dictates the permitted solution before anybody finishes defining the problem.

Democrats and Republicans have constituents they must satisfy.

And frequently those constituents are not the voters.

The political class develops priorities that frequently aren’t the priorities of the people paying the bills.

Then everybody retreats to their corner and calls the stalemate principle.

Maybe we could use more pragmatists.

The Art of the Deal

As painful as it may be for some people to admit, Trump’s The Art of the Deal contains another qualification we should think about when selecting presidents.

Negotiation.

Trump sees negotiations differently from most politicians.

He understands leverage.

He understands opening positions.

He understands that the first proposal doesn’t necessarily have to be the final proposal.

He understands that sometimes you begin by asking for something outrageous because doing so changes the boundaries of the conversation.

Some of Trump’s proposals sound preposterous.

Sometimes they probably are preposterous.

Trump is fully capable of saying something ridiculous without having formulated a master strategy beforehand.

But it is equally foolish to assume that every outrageous opening is proof that he hasn’t thought about what comes next.

An extreme opening position can establish an anchor.

It can force the opponent to react to your proposal instead of allowing you to react to his.

It can reveal what the other side really values.

And it can create room for an eventual agreement that would have looked impossible before the negotiation began.

Trump also understands something politicians frequently forget:

Sometimes no deal is better than a bad deal.

Government officials often enter negotiations under tremendous pressure to produce an agreement. If everyone knows you must return home waving a signed document, your opponent already possesses leverage.

A businessman learns that occasionally the most powerful word in a negotiation is no.

I don’t need the next president to have Trump’s personality.

But I’d like him to understand leverage.

The Trouble With Trump

None of this requires pretending Donald Trump doesn’t come with enough baggage to fill an airport carousel.

He can be crass.

He is vain.

His ego enters the room several minutes before the rest of him.

He turns disagreements into personal battles that never needed to happen.

He can insult somebody who might have helped him ten minutes later.

His discipline leaves something to be desired.

And sometimes his mouth obscures a perfectly legitimate argument.

Trump’s supporters occasionally make the mistake of believing that because his enemies exaggerate his faults, we have to pretend those faults don’t exist.

We don’t.

Trump can behave like a buffoon.

But he’s no dummy.

And confusing those two things can be a serious mistake.

The characteristics that make Trump difficult can sometimes make him effective.

His unpredictability creates chaos, but it can also prevent opponents from knowing exactly what he will do.

His ego creates unnecessary conflict, but it also makes him difficult to intimidate.

His willingness to violate political conventions can be embarrassing, but it also allows him to question assumptions that professional politicians stopped questioning years ago.

His stubbornness can prevent compromise.

It can also prevent surrender.

The trick for the future isn’t finding another Trump.

It is identifying which characteristics were valuable and finding them in somebody with better self-control.

The Candidate After Trump

The next round of interviews is about to begin. Suppose this time we interviewed presidential candidates differently.

What have you built?

What have you run?

How many people have depended upon your decisions for their livelihood?

Have you ever been responsible for a real budget you couldn’t simply increase?

Have you negotiated when your own money or reputation was at risk?

Have you ever hired somebody smarter than you?

Have you fired somebody you personally liked because they couldn’t do the job?

When did you abandon a plan because the facts showed it wasn’t working?

Tell us about your biggest failure.

Tell us what it cost you.

Tell us what you learned.

And perhaps most importantly:

Can you listen to experts without becoming captive to them?

A President needs experts.

Nobody understands everything from nuclear weapons to epidemiology to monetary policy to artificial intelligence.

But experts advise.

Presidents decide.

The adviser can write another paper explaining why his theory should have worked.

The President has to live with what actually happened.

I’d like a President capable of listening carefully to the smartest people in the room and then asking:

That’s a fine theory. Does the damned thing work?

What We Should Keep

Our MAGA discussions have repeatedly led me to the same conclusion.

Trump and the ideas associated with him don’t have to remain permanently attached to one another.

Some of the ideas are bigger than the man.

So are some of the lessons about leadership.

Maybe presidential experience should include more than government service.

Maybe building something matters.

Maybe meeting payroll matters.

Maybe negotiating matters.

Maybe failure matters.

Maybe accountability matters.

Maybe having operated in the real world, where arithmetic eventually wins every argument, matters too.

And then let’s add the qualities we wish Trump possessed in greater quantity.

Humility.

Discipline.

Temperament.

The ability to hear criticism without treating it as betrayal.

The ability to admit error without believing the admission makes him weak.

Confidence without constant self-celebration.

Strength without needless cruelty.

Pragmatism without chaos.

Imagine a candidate with substantial executive experience, negotiating ability, an understanding of risk and accountability, the willingness to challenge stale assumptions—and enough humility and discipline not to make every issue about himself.

That sounds like somebody worth interviewing.

Every four years Americans are told we are choosing the most powerful leader in the world.

Maybe it’s time we stopped conducting the interview as though we’re selecting the chairman of a political club.

The presidency is an executive job.

We ought to start hiring accordingly.

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