Would You Let Trump Run Your Company?

In Washington, people struggling to come to terms with all the details of James Comey’s sacking and the claim that Donald Trump asked him to drop the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn have reached back to Watergate for comparison. But in many ways the more appropriate perspective is through a business lens: The immediate issue is whether a boss tried to halt embarrassing revelations about his company; the underlying one is whether he knows how to run it.

Of course, running a country is not the same as running a company. A president is both more constrained (by Congress, the press, and voters) and less so (chief executive officers, as a rule, can’t bomb their opponents). And Trump is not the first incoming president to have boasted of his corporate experience; remember George W. Bush, the first MBA president? But Bush had also run Texas. No president has tried to claim the mantle of CEO-in-chief as completely as Trump.