Business, Politics, and President Trump

One of the things many people don't understand is the difference between business and politics, at least our current politics. In business if you have a problem that goes unaddressed, your competition has an avenue to provide a product or service that is better than yours. If you continue to ignore the problem in your business, it will gradually degrade and sooner or later you won't have a business any longer. National politicians don't have to work in an environment of competition, there is only one federal government so there is no competition.

I used to work in a factory setting making car parts for the automotive industry. This company had a vice president that was extremely good at solving manufacturing problems. He would come in to the plant with a problem with no time table for leaving, sometimes we would have warnings of his upcoming arrival and sometimes we wouldn't. He would call meetings on the first day he was there to understand the problem and get a sense of who in the company had the better grasp of the situation.

Once this vice president got a handle on the situation, he would start asking questions about how we were handling different contributing factors to the problem. If there was something not being handled or it was assumed couldn't be handled the vice president would issue directives along the lines of "If your not controlling this, then you need to take this set of actions to counteract your lack of ability to control it". He expected his idea to be implemented usually the next day even if the directive was given at 7 pm that night, before 7 am his new plan should be implemented. It really made life simpler if you had a plan of your own to put in place before his arrival, which I took to heart after my first experience working in close proximity to him. With all of the stress and intrusion into my personal life, working with him was always a great learning experience.

Those in the same company that were more politically oriented would pull together a team to study the problem and take weeks putting together a detailed plan of how to attack the problem. Although both methods often reached the same goal, the vice president's method took only a few days to show improvement in the problem the political solution took weeks if not months to show the same improvement.

President Trump is a business man, not a politician. Look at some of the problems he's worked on:

NAFTA was an unfair trade deal for the United States

Rather than pull together working committees and going through months and months of negotiations with no real motivation to change anything, President Trump took the business approach. The President and his team new the items they wanted to address in NAFTA and said, we're going to get a new trade deal or I'm going to put significant tariffs on your goods coming into the country.

This approach worked with Canada and Mexico and has since been expanded to use with other countries. President Trump and his team know that long term tariffs are not the solution. Tariffs placed on goods would be equivalent to an additional tax on the American people wanting to buy the imported goods but the tariffs would provide an economic incentive for entrepreneurs to start businesses to replace the more expensive imports.

North Korea was out of control

President Trump used tough sanctions on North Korea to reign them in. As a result, we now have North Korea at least talking with other countries instead of threatening them.

Mexico not doing enough to stop illegal immigration into the U.S.

By allowing practically free passage of immigrants through the country, you might say Mexico was making the U.S. immigration problem worse. It's being polite to say Mexico was just not doing enough to stem the flow of immigrants from Central America. To bring a change to Mexico's actions, President Trump again used the threat of tariffs if Mexico didn't start doing something to act as our partner in this problem. As a result, Mexico is helping with the flow of immigrants. Mexico is working at it's southern border to slow this flow and returning people back to their native country.

No action in Congress on immigration

The relationship between the House of Representatives and the President has to be at a historic low. Liberals in Congress complain about how the President is handling the crisis at the border without any headway on immigration reform. The President, on the other hand, is following the immigration laws that have been generated by Congress. Congress may complain about the separation of families at the border but they are the one's that established those policies, and the policies didn't start when President Trump took office. Congress may complain about the poor conditions of housing the immigrants at the border, but do nothing to generate funding to bring it up to their standards.

President Trump recently announced the administration was ready to start deporting illegal aliens that had failed to meet their responsibilities under the current immigration laws. The initial actions were to involve some 2000 raids across the country to detain illegal immigrants. Nancy Pelosi called President Trump asking him to cancel the raids, this was after she had said she was through trying to work with him. The initial set of raids have been delayed, rather than cancelled, to provide Democrats and Republicans the opportunity to work on immigration reform.

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President Trump's takes some tough stances when he starts negotiating and usually have a carrot and stick approach behind them. Here's the carrot I want you to agree with or here's the stick I'm going to beat you with. Even with this approach, I don't think President Trump is a completely hard line negotiator on his initial offering. I believe he does have a hard line in mind but starts out asking for more than he wants. I also don't believe he takes many actions without a purpose in mind. The next time you hear of a significant action by President Trump, take a few minutes and ask yourself "who's button is he pushing with this action?".