CEO leadership style isn’t working as president

By Joe Garofoli

Sunday, May 7, 2017 | 2 a.m.

President Donald Trump says he’s learning that deal-making in the political world is different than it is in the business world, but his actions over the past couple several days show he’s far from mastering the skill.

His CEO style of negotiating appears to be working less well in his role as president, where he is forced to pivot constantly to meet the demands of Congress and restrictions set by the judiciary.

Yet instead of evolving into that role, Trump has ramped up his freewheeling leadership style over the past few days, proposing things that are political uranium, like a new federal gas tax, to his fellow Republicans and sabotaging the latest GOP health care overhaul by promising provisions that don’t exist.

Unlike a CEO, a president can’t bark orders or riff on blue-sky ideas and expect Congress to make them happen.

“The difference is that in the business world, you don’t have to do a deal. You don’t have to buy that hotel. You can declare bankruptcy,” said Tammy Frisby, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

“Now he has to fund the government. He has to deal with North Korea. I think he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the necessity of the choices he faces here,” said Frisby, the survey director for Hoover’s Golden State Poll.

It’s not just that Trump isn’t winning “so much that you’ll be tired of winning,” as he promised during the campaign, he is actually losing using that style.

When his fellow Republicans, who control Congress, did a deal with Democrats this week to fund the government through September, they didn’t include funding for several of Trump’s top campaign promises. And the president reportedly wasn’t even part of the negotiations.

There’s no funding for a border wall, the centerpiece of his campaign. The Environmental Protection Agency will retain nearly all of its funding instead of seeing the 31 percent cut Trump had outlined. The National Institutes of Health won’t get trimmed by 20 percent as Trump had wanted — it will gain $2 billion in funding. Planned Parenthood won’t be defunded.

The budget rebuff shows that Trump has yet to find a way to work with Capitol Hill. Trump didn’t have a significant legislative accomplishment in his first 100 days of office and fulfilled only six of the 103 campaign promises he made, according to the nonpartisan fact-checkers Politifact. The twist: All of those campaign promises were accomplished through executive actions — CEO style, without the participation of Congress.

As the influential historian Richard Neustadt wrote more than half a century ago, the power of the presidency is “the power to persuade” — that’s different from issuing orders. Neustadt characterized President Dwight Eisenhower, an Army general and the last person prior to Trump to be elected president without previous political experience, as a leader who felt that “when he’s decided something, that ought to be the end of it ... and when it bounces back undone or done wrong, he tends to react with shocked surprise.”

Trump, who had no government or military experience before winning the White House, is having a similar experience.

“If you’re the CEO of a company, you can say stuff and people will do what you want. But the presidency of the United States is not like that in any respect,” said Casey Dominguez, a professor of political science at the University of San Diego and an expert on presidential power.

“So far,” Dominguez said, the CEO approach “is not working.”

Trump was elected, in part, because he’s a disrupter. Many of his supporters, frustrated with the stagnated political system and their receding economic prospects, were drawn to his tough-talking promises to shake things up.

That worked on the campaign trail — promises are only promises until they become policy. But now Trump is confusing many of his fellow Republicans by shifting policy proposals without consulting them.

Over the past several days, Trump has promised that people with pre-existing conditions would be covered under the proposed GOP health care overhaul (not necessarily true), floated an increase in the federal gas tax (an idea anathema to the GOP), and tweeted Tuesday that the government needs “a good shutdown” in September to “fix (this) mess” — a reaction to the budget deal.

Those are the kind of shoot-from-the-hip opinions Trump could utter as CEO of his own family-run multinational conglomerate as he tried to work a deal.

That style doesn’t work in the White House, where Trump “leads the largest company in the world,” Frisby said. “He’s making comments and riffing and putting out proposals in the same sort of way he did when he wanted his company to sell steaks.”

Trump is also carrying over another ongoing technique from his business-world negotiating style: over-promising. During several recent interviews, the president promised that the GOP health care bill would cover people with pre-existing conditions. “Pre-existing conditions are in the bill,” Trump told “Face the Nation” last weekend, “and I mandate it.”

That isn’t entirely accurate. In the current form of the American Health Care Act, an amendment introduced by Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., would permit states to obtain a waiver allowing insurers to set their own premium prices.

In practice, according to PolitiFact.com, “that means states can allow insurers to charge more for people who are sicker but less for people who are healthier,” which is currently illegal under the Affordable Care Act passed during the Obama administration.

Last month, Trump promised to roll out his tax reform plan. Instead, his top economic advisers presented a one-page sheet containing a few bullet points, the highlight being tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans.

If Trump’s style is confusing to Washington lawmakers, it’s also confounding to Americans who don’t like some of his hardball negotiating tactics, especially involving the health care law, according to an April nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

In particular, six in 10 respondents to an April survey didn’t like Trump’s threat to cut payments for the Affordable Care Act’s cost-sharing payments as a way to get Democrats to start negotiating on a replacement for Obamacare. Those respondents agreed that Trump “should not use negotiating tactics like these that could disrupt insurance markets and cause people to lose health coverage,” according to the survey.

Joe Garofoli is the senior political writer for The San Francisco Chronicle.