Q: Would you consider Donald Trump to be a visionary leader?
A: No.
Donald Trump is a boss. He yells people into submission. For a certain class of people over a certain class of problems, this is a very effective style of leadership. It is not visionary.
You want to get 300 tons of concrete moved to a construction site? You don’t ask Laura Dern to be your leader. You don’t ask Barack Obama to supervise the operations of a coal mine. You want to send troops into battle? You don’t put Nancy Pelosi on the comms.
There are all kinds of tasks for which Donald Trump is unsuitable. But there are many for which he is effective. People tend to forget that the presidency of the US calls for more skills than any one person can individually possess.
I think the President does a poor job of delegating authority which is how any leader extends his effectiveness beyond his individual capacity. I think this quality was evident during his campaign. However what his supporters wanted wasn’t a team player to get along in Washington DC, they wanted somebody with the hardheaded boldness to shake things up in no uncertain terms. They wanted an outsider. They wanted somebody to shake up the status quo. That’s what they got.
One more thing about ‘visionary’. When we talk about leadership, a visionary must articulate their vision and then execute. Anybody can have a ‘vision’. But they must be true to that vision, they must continually convince people that vision is attainable and they must deliver. When JFK said put a man on the moon, it was visionary. The point was that he delivered because he convinced enough people to accept that vision, be true to it and made it possible to achieve.
Achievement of a vision makes one effective as a leader. But the vision itself needn’t be attractive. The Nationalist government of South Africa had a vision for their society that they achieved. Their vision was inspired by the failure of American Reconstruction and the effectiveness of Jim Crow. They perfected that systematic vision in a theory called Apartheid. They delivered.
With that in mind, a lot of foolish people claim that Donald Trump, bigot that he may be, has a similar vision of White Nationalism for America. That is far from the truth. He simply yells people into submission and cannot effectively delegate. This is not an effective style of leadership for the legal subjugation of millions of people.
Donald Trump is not a visionary leader. There is no ‘Trumpism’.
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Consider the following:
I don't think Trump has considered the merits or demerits of the geopolitical balance of power provided (or not) by NATO outside of the shallow question of how much the US pays for it.
Interestingly, I think this very thin logic is actually appropriate for the standing down of US military forces, because quite frankly Americans have no clear idea what our boys should be doing in the world - and that includes defending treaties. There is no domestic consensus, and he promised no vision. He received no mandate from his constituency other than the most simplistic 'support the troops'. The most dimwitted fool could see that America's enthusiasm for violent engagement, even against ISIS in Syria, was over. The US had been telegraphing rules of non-engagement even to the Russian military in Syria since its very beginning in 2013, when Syria's documented possession and use of chemical weapons - Obama's Red Line - was crossed. We backed down. It was a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East that Trump never questioned.
Who would call Trump's Space Force a strategic vision? Who would call his sending regular army to the southern border a strategic vision. Trump is bereft of strategic visions - he could simply listen to 40 hours of Rush Limbaugh and figure out what level of Republican talking points he needed to address and beat Ted Cruz into submission. He did just that.
Ted Cruz thought the American Right was a quiet majority that could be cultivated and respond to his values. Trump proved the American Right was disjointed, chock full of anger & frustration and vulnerable to a hostile takeover. That is precisely where the Republican Party is right now, an organization hollowed out by a hostile takeover running on oppositional fumes and innovating nowhere.
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