My friend, who is no fan of President Trump (PT), says that either PT knows what we don’t know, or he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
Let’s give PT the benefit of the doubt and say he knows what we (or I) don’t know. I can only guess what it is, and that guess would be he’s consciously dismantling the federal government, because he believes that a deep state has been created, meaning the professional arm of the government has become more powerful than our elected officials in congress.
But, my hunch is the above explanation is putting it mildly. For PT, it’s much more personal.
Deep down, all his life PT has been planning to overthrow the bureaucracy he loathes. One can’t imagine the depths of disgust entrepreneurs have for what they consider to be feckless federal regulators who haven’t created a penny of new wealth in their lives. People like PT think regulators have a perverse delight in trying to bring down wealth creators like himself.
He believes that the deep state is so big and powerful that not only has it become guilty of over reach, but of serving its own lusts for power.
An example of this would be the behavior of FBI director James Comey in the presidential election of 2016. He was a contributing factor to Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
PT fired Comey. I believe that was a correct move, although PT fired him for a different reason.
I’ve been a management consultant for over thirty three years, and if I’ve learned anything, it is that unless organizations get cleaned out occasionally, they do indeed become top heavy and slightly corrupt.
By corrupt I mean that top executives habitually hire in their own image, meaning they hire people who not only agree with their decision making style, but with their decisions before the decisions are made. These people agree and go along because it becomes the easiest route to ascending in the organization.
Because of this, very rarely do you get great executives rising through the ranks. You usually get executives who are pack dogs. In other words, they know that their survival depends on following the alpha dog. They’re not fighters by nature, they’re survivors.
In a free and open society, there must exist ways to attack and eliminate naturally occurring corruption. For example, publicly traded companies are good for breaking up pack mentality. If the pack doesn’t perform up to potential, which they hardly ever do, shareholders quickly become upset, and put pressure on those companies to hire new leaders who will create more value from the assets under their direction.
I think I’m like PT in this one regard. I have trouble respecting corporate types, who are ensconced in an hierarchical structure. Very, very seldom will they take the boss on. They obey the boss, whether or not the boss is right or wrong. This kind of structure makes people corrupt. They live to crawl up the structure. If you have any kind of independence of spirit, you end up hating the structure that imprisons those who have been ensnared in it.
All organizations, and I mean all, become corrupt over time. Even the foundation of society, the family, is subject to corruption. For example, unconsciousness favoritism on the part of parents toward one sibling often drives the other sibling to revolt and bolt from the family. Nothing wrong with that. It has a tendency for family members to wake up and improve their relationships.
All organizations fail to honor their mission after a time. Organizations lose focus and energy; they get lazy and forget the reason for which they were created. In a free society, where challenge to the status quo is protected, all organizations will get the wire brush, IF they are lucky. The process is not painless, and no one escapes being a part of a cleansing sooner or later. It’s the cleansing that saves them from getting dirtier and dirtier. Once you get dirty, self loathing sets in.
Right now, we are going through a cleansing at the federal level. I have no idea how it will turn out, but make no doubt about it, things will be different after PT.
Well, that’s my guess.