not anyone can do this job

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“The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”

Hippocrates

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• I once wrote this:

“And, let’s face it, I don’t care who you are and where you have worked you have eyed what another person is doing and thought you could do it. At some point, if you have had some success, all jobs start having some commodity-like characteristics which tease you into believing shifting from one to another just isn’t that difficult.”

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So. Let’s go back in the wayback machine to November 2016. Trump was the president elect and a shitload of people were freaking out. The world was bifurcated by “he can’t do that job” and “of course he can do that job.” It’s as if half the world thought, well, anyone can do “this job” if they had some success doing another job. It became a lazy argument on one side and an incredibly complex argument on the other. Regardless. That argument failed because it was grounded in the wrong fundamentals. The truth, the reality, was Trump was not a good business man, he was a good salesman. Not to disparage salespeople, I’m just making a distinction. And he ‘sold’ enough people on whatever he was trying to sell (I thought it was weird because he was selling America was a shithole, but anyway …) to get a job he was supremely unqualified for.

And, if people were truly honest, he really sucked at being the president. He certainly, objectively, was not a calming leader who offered certainty to 330 million people on a daily basis nor did he produce results matching the “sales promises” he made (as noted earlier, economy was good, not great). He ran on crushing ISIS (which was 90% done by the time he came into office), build a border wall (he did send a shitload of money on 55 miles worth), created huge deficits through a tax cut which disproportionately benefited rich people like hm combined with huge subsidies to subsidize whole industries to compensate for a dull axe tariff strategy and, well, he mostly didn’t do anything constructive. For the most part he didn’t fulfill responsibilities of being a prescient, he didn’t act like a president, and made an American president the comedic punching bag of the world. So, when people tell us to calm down with regard to Trump, I think they are nuts. He didn’t do the job the first time and hi seriously doubt he will be able to do the job this time and, oddly, the price at this stage is higher. Why? Well. Everything is going pretty well for the United States at the moment. Economy great. Growth great. Employment great. And all of those things are a fragile complex weave of things. Do I believe the Biden administration crafted all the great things in a whole cloth fashion? Nope. The outcome, the good stuff, was partly good decisions, some good nudges, and a confluence of unplanned good events. But you know what? That is what knowing how to do a job works. You put yourself, and your country, in a good position to take advantage of emergent opportunities. That’s doing a good job. Trump never did that and he never will. He doesn’t have the vision to see patterns before they occur – he is too transactional. Basically, he can’t do the job of the presidency.

Anyway. I am saying we shouldn’t have calmed down then and we shouldn’t calm down now. He is still supremely unqualified, and he may actually be even less qualified now than then (I find it unqualifying in business if someone’s competency digresses over time).

Gays and LGBT and blacks and minorities and women do not need to calm down. While his agenda is not theirs, his agenda creates negative consequences and effect on theirs. Business leaders should be scared shitless and should not calm down. All immigrants, legal or illegal, should be scared shitless and should not calm down.

No one should calm down because Trump will continue use “loose lips sink ships” type of asshat rhetoric and will continuously create unneeded trouble for himself and the country and the citizens. And he will deserve the trouble, but the country and citizens deserve better.

But what makes him most unqualified not just as a present but also as a leader is the fact he bases all practical tactics and actions on hope. Yeah. Its kind of like trickle down economics; another hope concept. You do something and you hope something else happens so that it creates the outcomes you hope will occur. That last sentence is Trump in a nutshell.

He wasn’t very good at anything other than (a) playing victim, (b) absolving himself of any responsibility, (c) blustering and bloviating every day, and (d) creating chaos and uncertainty. He, and his administration, is amateur hour which is simultaneously funny and scary.
I had one delusional friend say in 2016 “don’t worry, there are so many things in place anyone could do the job.” That is fucking nuts, but I think a shitload of people actually think this. This is a dangerous cultural issue we face now. The commoditization of qualifications & competency. In today’s world there is a general concept that anyone can do any job as well as anyone else. We sit around bitching about decisions leaders make and say ‘we could make a better decision than that.’ It leads to a belief that certain skills don’t matter and qualifications, particularly if you can be called an ‘expert’, aren’t worth a shit. The consequences of this is real skills and qualifications are commoditized and no one can tell the difference between the qualified and the asshats. And once that becomes a non-issue those being evaluated by the larger public are considered equals in people’s eyes with regard to skill & competency. And, holy shit, what a fucking false equivalency that is whenever Trump is involved. He is a salesman. He is a carnival barker. He is not someone who can do the job of president.
Anyway.
Not anyone can do this job, we learned that lesson the hard way in 2016 and I worry we will have to relearn that lesson in 2024.