Donald Trump’s most crippling deficiency as president is his innate inability to understand process. His abject failure to even embrace the concept of process, let alone direct and nurture it, is the main reason for his subterranean poll numbers, a dismal legislative scorecard and a rapidly declining base.
Process is everything when it comes to effective organizational leadership. It’s how people interact, manage conflict, decide and work toward accomplishing shared goals. And therein lies the problem for this president. As the closest thing to a genuine solipsist to ever occupy the White House, the Donald is barely cognizant of other people, let alone able to direct productive interactions with them. He simply doesn’t do process.
Take the latest example: Trump brought crowds to their feet last year by characterizing undocumented immigrants as the scourge of the earth. He insisted that they all be deported and that a wall be built to keep them out. “Send Them Home!” and “Build the Wall!” were iconic chants at his rallies. (Here and here.) Once elected, Trump softened a bit on 800,000 young people who grew up in America after being illegally brought into the country as children. These are the “dreamers” who were saved from deportation by the Obama administration in 2012. Trump’s base spent the past eight months pushing him to pull that plug and send the dreamers packing. That’s exactly what he did two weeks ago. He, in effect, nullified Obama’s order, but gave the dreamers a six-month reprieve, allowing Congress to do what it has been unable to do for two decades: enact an immigration bill addressing the issue.
Then, just last week, Trump, over dinner with Democratic Congressional leaders, supposedly indicated he was ready to support a bill allowing the dreamers to remain in the country in exchange for some border security measures that would not include his infamous wall. And all hell broke loose. Red Trump hats are being torched by their disgruntled owners, one of whom tweeted, “Put a fork in Trump. He’s done.” Breitbart News, the ultraconservative website run by Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, called the president “Amnesty Don.” Ann Coulter, a provocateur for all things very right of center and one of Trump’s most steadfast supporters, turned on a dime with this tweet: “At this point who DOESN’T want Trump impeached?”
The president was crushed by the reaction, and has seesawed back and forth on his position ever since, creating the most bipartisan confusion this town has seen since Alexander Haig contended he was in charge of the Regan White House. But Trump brought this turmoil on himself by paying no attention to process. This guy spent 18 months pumping up his xenophobic fan club about all those rotten drugged-up, thieving, raping illegals and now he’s telling them to love 800,000 of them and let them stay.
I learned quickly as a union rep that it was much easier to get a group of mistreated workers up the mountaintop of a contract campaign than it was to get them down again. In collective bargaining, as in politics, you get nowhere without a mobilized base. At the same time, you can accomplish nothing for that base without making a deal that falls short of your campaign rhetoric. Effective leadership means managing expectations and helping your troops slowly descend that mountain. It’s far more art than science, and it requires leaders to prepare folks for gains that are more incremental than revolutionary.
Barack Obama’s 2008 election was a seminal moment in American politics. Against significant odds, a black man promising hope and change was elected president. An enormous crowd gathered in Chicago, chanting “Yes We Can!” while waiting to hear from the president-elect. Obama, an astute student of process from his days as a community organizer, had this message for his cheering supporters: “There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.” Contrast that with this line from Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
The truth is that this president doesn’t understand the system at all. America is not a sole proprietorship where the owner calls all the shots. Sadly, that is all that Trump has ever known about process. That’s why he is exasperated with Congressional rules, and with votes that don’t go his way. He wants his campaign platform implemented by fiat. Every president does. Trump is the only one who actually believed it would happen. All his predecessors were frustrated by the time consuming process of governing, of listening and talking with others, having to know what buttons to push, when to come on strong and when to back off – the basic nitty-gritty of playing well with others. Yet, they persisted. That’s because they grasped the power of process.
Leaders who ignore process do so at their own peril. Take Lemuel Boulware, for example. As head of General Electric’s labor relations in the 1960s, Boulware decided to dispense with the normal rituals of contract negotiations. He saw no reason to engage in drawn-out meetings and an endless give-and-take. He opened – and closed – negotiations with what was seen then as a fairly generous offer and made it clear that the company would neither change nor discuss it, resulting in a very ugly strike. It also coined a new term in the lexicon of collective bargaining: “Boulwarism”, a take-it-or-leave it proposal that usurps process.
The superhero image of Donald Trump singlehandedly draining the swamp was obviously a successful campaign narrative. Like all superhero stories, it was pure fiction. This country’s founders, the people who actually did make America great, constructed a process, complete with three branches of elected and appointed players. Process is not always pretty, or fast, or easy. Neither is democracy. But it is far better than either Boulwarism or Trumpism.