HE'S BILLY CARTER, NOT EVEN JIMMY:

Trump, as a businessman with independent and populist instincts, taps into a very old and deep tradition in American political life: The desire to "run the government like a business." One of the problems with running the government like a business is that the government is not a business. It is a different kind of undertaking, and it makes no more sense to try to run it like a business than it would to try to run your church like a business, or a Girl Scout troop. (Okay, maybe Girl Scout troops are a business, the running dogs of cookie capitalism.) Businesses, nonprofit corporations, and religious congregations are all worthwhile forms of social organization, but they are not interchangeable. There is something poetic about the fact that our contemporary populist conservatives, avowed foes of progressives and progressivism, are in thrall to one of the most ancient and enduring of all progressive errors: the belief that the government (and society) can be run the way a business is run, as though a nation were only "one big factory," as the socialists used to put it.

Donald Trump has in fact never successfully run a large organization, and his few attempts to do so -- notably with the Trump Taj Mahal and the Plaza Hotel bankruptcies -- ended badly. For all his boasting about his employees and sprawling business empire (on the campaign trail, he lied about owning a hotel in Honolulu), what he has mostly done is run a small family business he inherited from his father, employing his wives and children, and leverage his tabloid celebrity into a series of very lucrative licensing and media deals. There is nothing wrong with a career that consists of a series of licensing deals and the like, but it is a very different kind of career from, say, running Microsoft or Ford. Donald Trump is not the executive he played on television.

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