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Is Trump is treating the presidency like a show.

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Is Trump is treating the presidency like a show.

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Donald Trump has referred to potential members of his presidential administration as "the finalists", leading to accusations the US President-elect is treating the running of the country like a game show.

Mr Trump tweeted: "Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!"

Before running for president, the billionaire businessman hosted the US version of reality TV show ' The Apprentice', in which he whittled down potential candidates for a job until only three finalists - and then one winner - remained.

His use of the word "finalists" led observers to point out that the President-elect is choosing senior government officials and not the winner of a reality show.

One Twitter user replied to Mr Trump, saying :"This isn't a contest, dude. You're literally about to run the USA. Are you serious?"

Another called the language "insane".

@realDonaldTrump THIS ISN'T A GAME SHOW YOU TWIT
- ra¢hel kiley (@rachelkiley) November 16, 2016

@realDonaldTrump does this mean there is a new season of the apprentice or
- Anna Fitzpatrick (@bananafitz) November 16, 2016

@realDonaldTrump This isn't a contest, dude. You're literally about to run the USA. Are you serious?
- Will Mendelson (@williemendelson) November 16, 2016

@realDonaldTrump This is, of course, insane
- Charles P. Pierce (@ESQPolitics) November 16, 2016

Mr Trump's attempt to reassure the American public that presidential appointments are on track comes amid claims of deep divisions in the President-elect's transitional team.

His new chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is an experienced Washington insider while his Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, is a white nationalist who previously ran far-right news website Breibart News.

One member of the team, Mike Rogers, was removed this week amid claims of a purge of Trump advisers who are close to New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who chaired the transition team before being replaced last week by Mike Pence, the Vice President-elect.

Mr Trump's son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, is reported to be at the centre of the infighting.

Mr Kushner's father was prosecuted by Mr Christie, the then Attorney General, in 2014 on charges of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions.

A source inside Mr Trump's team told CNN the situation resembled a "knife fight", with advisers and the Trump family involved in increasingly bitter disputes.

Others who have had dealings with the transition team also warned about the actions of its members.

Eliot Cohen, a former foreign policy official under George W Bush, wrote on Twitter: "After exchange w[ith] Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away. They're angry, arrogant, screaming 'you LOST!' Will be ugly".

Before defending his team over the appointments process, Mr Trump also took to social media to praise the Electoral College voting system after it carried him to victory despite his rival, Hillary Clinton, receiving more public votes.

He said: "The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play."

It is a significant shift in Mr Trump's views since 2012, when he called the electoral college "a disaster for democracy" and said it "made a laughing stock of our nation" after mistakenly believing it had held President Obama retain the White House despite losing the public vote. In reality Mr Obama won both the public vote and the Electoral College vote.

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Donald Trump appears to confuse politics with his reality TV show

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Donald Trump has referred to potential members of his presidential administration as "the finalists", leading to accusations the US President-elect is treating the running of the country like a game show. Mr Trump tweeted: "Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions.

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 How does Trump's VIEWS affect his business?

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 How does Trump's VIEWS affect his business?

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"If @real DonaldTrump loses this election, im betting he personally goes bankrupt w/in 7 yrs. Thats how toxic his brand now is." So tweeted self-made billionaire Mark Cuban yesterday. And while I take no position on the bankruptcy forecast, Cuban's point about Trump's brand is valid and important.

Trump's presidential run - unlike virtually all his previous attention-seeking behavior - may cost him significant money.

Trump deserves credit for hatching a genuine business innovation: branded high-end real estate. No one had previously created a brand that could be put on an office building or a hotel or an apartment building or a golf course and that would give any of those properties a patina of luxury and success. Trump did it, and the brand was his name. His business strategy over the past 40 years has been to keep himself in the public eye because every mention of his name in the media built the value of the brand.

At least that's how it worked until now.

Over the past 12 months Trump has almost certainly been devaluing his brand among the customers who are most important to his businesses - high-income individuals plus the corporations that rent space in his office buildings and hold conferences and meetings in his hotels or hotels that have licensed his name.

Trump's supporters in the election tend to be less educated and poorer than voters overall; they're not his customers. By contrast, he's losing heavily among college-educated voters, a group that includes most of his individual customers. Corporate customers find it increasingly difficult to associate themselves with Trump-branded real estate because of his astonishing ability to offend assorted groups - Latinos, Muslims, women, the disabled. No mainstream corporation wants to offend those groups by occupying space with Trump's name in shiny gold capital letters on the front.

There's evidence that Trump's brand devaluation is happening. Bloomberg cites research showing that among consumers earning over $150,000 a year, the Trump brand's value had plummeted by the end of last year. Other research finds that the market share of Trump casinos, hotels, and golf course plunged 14% from July 2015 to July 2016.

If Trump the brand were put on mass-market consumer products, time might heal the wounds that Trump the man has inflicted on it. But corporate customers won't forget what he has said, nor will many high-end individuals. Quite a few Latinos, Muslims, women, and disabled, regardless of income, won't forget either.

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It would be a mistake to think that Trump hasn't thought about all this. He has been a skillful brand steward for decades. Maybe he has a plan for repositioning his brand, or maybe he's so confident of winning in November that he believes he's about to ascend into a higher realm entirely.

But it would be ironic if the man who once bragged that he could be the first person ever to turn a profit on running for president instead decimated his fortune by running.

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Donald Trump's Brand May Be Ruined by Presidential Campaign

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"If @real DonaldTrump loses this election, im betting he personally goes bankrupt w/in 7 yrs. Thats how toxic his brand now is." So tweeted self-made billionaire Mark Cuban yesterday. And while I take no position on the bankruptcy forecast, Cuban's point about Trump's brand is valid and important.

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How is running a country different than running a business.

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How is running a country different than running a business.

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There were many and varied reasons behind the election of Donald Trump as president, but certainly one argument, heard time and again, contributed to his appeal: that the federal government was such a mess that the solution was to run it "like a business" and that the way to accomplish that was to elect a successful corporate executive. Now that the presidential transition is upon us, many of the people being selected or mentioned as cabinet appointees have stronger ties to the private sector than the public sector.

Trump is not the first politician, by any means, to benefit from this this claim. Numerous successful state and local candidates have made similar cases during their runs for office. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner's argument in his successful gubernatorial campaign centered around his business success. Three decades before that, fast-food magnate John Y. Brown successfully argued that he should be elected governor of Kentucky so that he could run the state like he had run Kentucky Fried Chicken.

This is not a 21st-century -- or even a 20th-century -- phenomenon. In a classic 1887 article, Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Princeton University, maintained that there was a "science of administration" -- arguing, in effect, that there were principles of management that transcended the context in which they were applied. "The field of administration is a field of business," wrote Wilson. "It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics."

Later observers and scholars of public administration thoroughly discredited this notion. The pithiest statement on the topic came from Wallace Sayre of Columbia University, who argued in 1958 that "public and private management [were] fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects." In 1979, Graham Allison, then dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, used Sayre's comment as a launching point from which to examine similarities and differences. He noted that both private firms and governments must set objectives, develop plans to achieve those objectives, hire people and direct them toward the achievement of objectives, and manage external environments. But he observed that the way in which these things occur is often fundamentally different from one sector to another.

Allison cited several examples of officials who went from high-level business careers to high-level government service and judged "public management different from private management -- and harder!" We could add to his list former Goldman Sachs executive and Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin, who observed that, compared to government, "the range of issues that you confront on Wall Street is really very narrow."

Some consensus has developed among scholars about the fundamental ways that running a government is different from running a business. Here are a few:

* Government is about this thing called the "public interest." There is no such animal in the private sector. Private firms care about their stakeholders and customers; they do not generally care about people who do not invest in their businesses or buy things from them. Thus, accountability is by necessity much broader in government; it is much more difficult to ignore particular groups or people.

* Private-sector performance is measured by profitability, while performance measurement in government needs to focus on the achievement of outcomes.

* Compromise is fundamental to success in the public sector. No one owns a controlling share of the government. When Gov. Rauner and the state legislature refused to negotiate, it resulted in Illinois operating without a budget for a full year. The notion of a separation of powers can be anathema to effective private management. It is central to the design of government, at least in the United States.

* Government must constantly confront competing values. The most efficient solution may disadvantage certain groups or trample on individual or constitutional rights. In the private sector, efficiency is value number one; in government, it is just one of many values.

* Government has a shorter time horizon. In government, the long term may describe the period between now and the next election. Thus there is a strong incentive to show relatively immediate impact.

* Government actions take place in public, with much scrutiny from the press and the public. There is no equivalent of C-SPAN showing how decisions are made in the corporate boardroom. Corporate leaders do not find it necessary to explain their every decision to reporters.

This partial list is intended simply to remind all of us that a government, particularly a large one such as a state or a big city or county, is an extremely complex enterprise to manage, much more so than any company. It remains to be seen, of course, how successful President-elect Trump and his appointees will be. To the extent that they are successful, however, it will not be because of their business experience but in spite of it.

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The Enduring Myth That Government Should Be Run Like a Business

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There were many and varied reasons behind the election of Donald Trump as president, but certainly one argument, heard time and again, contributed to his appeal: that the federal government was such a mess that the solution was to run it "like a business" and that the way to accomplish that was to elect a successful corporate executive.

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How is running a country different from running a business  . 

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How is running a country different from running a business  . 

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This article opened me up to the idea of a government run like a business.

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The idea that government should be run like a business is a popular one with both Republicans and, albeit to a lesser extent, Democrats. But this betrays a basic misunderstanding of the roles of the private and public sector. We should no more want the government to be run like a business than a business to be run like the government.

Those popularizing this notion feel this way because they see business as more efficient. This must be the case, so the logic goes, or the entity in question would lose market share and go bankrupt. Only the fit survive. Meanwhile, government agencies face no backlash. This is why we have long lines to get driver's licenses, poorly maintained VA hospitals, inferior returns on investment from Social Security, etc., etc. Were there a choice on where to be licensed to drive, then such offices would forced to make the customer's experience a positive one or they would go elsewhere.

There are, of course, many businesses that also make the customer's life very unpleasant because simply being in the private sector does not guarantee effective competition. The American Medical Association has, for example, argued for years that very few people actually have much choice when it comes to health care. It is a very concentrated industry, meaning that they can demand payment while giving only a vague idea of coverage (which may well change over time and with little to no notice) and they can delay reimbursement. And there are government agencies, like police and fire departments, where their dedication to duty has nothing to do with profit. They put their lives on the line every day because they think it's the right thing to do.

But while we might all grant that there are exceptions, the general question still stands: does it make sense to run government like a business? The short answer is no. Bear in mind, first, that "efficiency" in the private sector means profit. Hence, to ask that the government be run like a business is tantamount to asking that the government turn a profit. The problem in a nutshell, is that not everything that is profitable is of social value and not everything of social value is profitable. Reality TV, pornography, fashion, sports, and gambling are all of questionable social value, but each is quite profitable and exists in the private sector. Meanwhile, few would argue that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, police department, fire department, libraries, parks, and public schools are of no social value, and yet they could not exist if they were required to be profitable. Imagine maintaining a standing military by selling subscriptions door-to-door: "Hello, my name is Captain Johnson, and I represent the US Army. Are you afraid of foreigners? Would you like guaranteed protection against invasion, pillaging, enslavement, and more? Please see our brochure for our three levels of service." There would, of course, be a few subscribers, but nothing approaching the level necessary to truly protect the United States from attack.

To reiterate, the key issue is this: not everything that is profitable is of social value and not everything of social value is profitable. The proper role of government is the latter. Those arguing for a business model for government must necessarily be ready to shut down all government functions that do not earn a profit, regardless of their contribution to our well being. And, if the public sector is being run properly, that should mean every single one. If it's profitable, they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. There is no need for the government to start a chain of hamburger stands, hardware stores, or coffee shops. Rather, they run child protective services, the National Park Service, and the Air Force. Profit is the realm of business, while unprofitable but socially useful tasks is the responsibility of government.

This is not to say that every government agency is actually performing a useful public service or that it is not wasting resources (by whatever standard). Nor am I arguing that there are not many private sector activities that add greatly to our well being. The point, however, is that saying that government is inefficient because it does not turn a profit is the equivalent of saying that Peyton Manning is a poor quarterback because he doesn't hit enough home runs. He's not supposed to.

I am a professor of Economics at Texas Christian University, where I have worked since 1987. My areas of specialty are international economics (particularly exchange rates), macroeconomics, history of economics and contemporary schools of thought. During my time in Fort Wort...

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Why Government Should Not Be Run Like A Business

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The idea that government should be run like a business is a popular one with both Republicans and, albeit to a lesser extent, Democrats. But this betrays a basic misunderstanding of the roles of the private and public sector. We should no more want the government to be run like [...]

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Is Trump treating the presidency like a show?

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Is Trump treating the presidency like a show?

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This article talked about how he never went halfway. Like how you would in a reality tv show.

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He pulls in the numbers, too: The Season 1 finale of his long-running show, "The Apprentice," drew 28 million viewers. Now the Republican debates featuring Mr. Trump are drawing record-breaking numbers: nearly 23 million viewers tuned in to the CNN debate this month; 24 million watched the Fox News debate in August.

As a reality TV professional, I would be lucky to strike gold like Donald Trump once or twice in a career. Gurney Productions found it with the Robertson clan on "Duck Dynasty." You might watch a thousand casting tapes before you find a character half as watchable as Uncle Si of "Duck Dynasty" or Kim Kardashian or Flavor Flav. I can tell in 30 seconds of a Skype interview if a person is worthy of a show. I once talked to a fascinating young man who sells custom-armored vehicles to warlords in Africa; he was thoughtful, soft-spoken, conflicted about his work - dead-wrong for a reality show.

In the various guilty-pleasure/train-wreck formats of reality TV, development execs look for larger-than-life personalities who speak their mind and don't shy away from conflict. Self-awareness is a liability. They reveal their character through conflict, and the bigger the character, the deeper the conflict, the better the show.

A few years ago, I worked on the WE TV series "Bridezillas," a show that thrived on the conflict between a bride and anyone in her path. This subgenre of reality TV - terrible people behaving badly - works because friction is baked into the format. At the very least, I could usually count on drunken bridesmaids brawling over the tossed bouquet. Political campaigns have their conflict, too, but it's often too nuanced for a broad audience. Mr. Trump has cut through all that. His ad hominem insults have become his signature move. Even when he professes to be holding back - as when he said of Senator Rand Paul, "I never attacked him on his looks" - he still gets a jab in there somewhere: "Believe me, there is plenty of subject matter."

Donald Trump is the presidential candidate that reality TV made. An electorate trained in voting contestants on and off shows like "American Idol" wants to keep him around because he makes things interesting. Instead of any plausible policy stance, Mr. Trump has built his campaign around an entertaining TV persona.

Reality television has always been fixated on the trappings of wealth, from the Real Housewives to the Kardashians and Vanderpumps. In that sense, it's no different from any popular entertainment, from 19th-century novels to "Dynasty." We like stories about the rich for a lot of reasons - they live out our aspirations, and their mistakes and foibles shrink the gulf between their lives and ours. In a sense, Mr. Trump's immersion in the medium of reality TV normalizes his wealth. He connects with an audience for whom he represents the sort of rich guy they would be if they had the money.

Even if Mr. Trump's poll numbers do begin to dwindle as the G.O.P. electorate gets to know him better, he'll continue to draw an audience. In fact, Mr. Trump may be even more entertaining as an underdog, when he'll have even less incentive to play nice.

That's because reality shows thrive on high stakes, and there's nothing higher than leadership of the No. 1 country in the world. Nobody tunes in to " Deadliest Catch " to watch a routine fishing trip - we want to feel that the boat could capsize at any moment and four tons of king crabs could crush the greenhorn beneath their writhing weight.

So, no surprise: Mr. Trump rates. Love him or hate him, he makes us feel as if the future of our country is teetering on the precipice. It might be entertaining to watch our country implode under his leadership, but one of the great pleasures of reality television is being able to turn it off when you've had enough.

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Opinion | Donald Trump, Our Reality TV Candidate

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He pulls in the numbers, too: The Season 1 finale of his long-running show, "The Apprentice," drew 28 million viewers. Now the Republican debates featuring Mr. Trump are drawing record-breaking numbers: nearly 23 million viewers tuned in to the CNN debate this month; 24 million watched the Fox News debate in August.

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How does Trumps views affecting his business

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How does Trumps views affecting his business

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This was a helpful article because it showed me that his allegations affected others in business and not just him.

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Trump's D.C. hotel is a flop, his New York condos are declining in value and celebrities have turned against him

If the polls hold up and Republican nominee Donald Trump loses the election next month, America will have dodged many bullets. One of them will be the prospect of having a president who thinks he can avoid conflict of interest by turning his privately owned international brand and real estate business over to his children while he's in office.

With the exception of one big story in Newsweek that issue has not been seriously pursued by the news media, even though it would have literally been impossible for Trump to properly carry out the duties of the office had he won, given the nature of his business and the legal problems that would have ensued if he tried to extricate himself from it. Trump would have had to unwind his businesses years before running for president to avoid being paralyzed by conflicts.

He may come to regret not having done so, even though he's probably going to be back to full-time "dealmaking" in about three weeks. We don't know how much he was worth when he started this campaign but reports are suggesting that it's a lot less today. The Trump brand has a problem and it's spreading beyond his consumer goods to his real estate holdings.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that regular customers for his consumer goods are throwing out their Trump merchandise in small acts of rebellion against his baleful candidacy. And some of Trump's well-heeled customers are now boycotting his hotels and golf courses and refusing to dine in restaurants on his properties. One retired doctor interviewed for that story canceled an $18,000 vacation at Trump's Doral golf club with 11 of his buddies, saying, "For me, it's an ethical statement."

Ivanka Trump's clothing line has been similarly affected. Her customers are young working women - few of whom are voting for her father. And she is obviously concerned, although in typical Trump fashion the woman everyone sees as the classy face of the Trump empire reacted very much like her father earlier this week, when quizzed about his "rigged election" talk at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Conference in California. She said this:

I will tell you that the media has been vicious and, look, there's a lot of businesspeople in the room. We've all had articles written about us by the business press that we say, "Hmm, you know, that wasn't exactly fair," or, you know, the fact-check - there's a few things off. But you know, this has been, this has been a different level. And look, we take it personally. Obviously, there are some things said that are deeply personal, but just on a less emotional example this week or in the last couple of days, I saw on the front cover of The New York Times a story talking about how the Trump brand was being decimated due to the campaign.

She further complained that the Trump Organization had provided all kinds of statistics challenging the Times' conclusions, but the paper refused to listen. She said, "I think that the bias is very, very real. And I don't think I would have said this to you even a year ago. I don't. But I've just - I've seen it too many times. It's tremendous." Since the question was about the campaign and she immediately launched into a diatribe about the media being unfair to the business, it's logical to assume that she is feeling the pressure in that regard.

According to various other reports, Ivanka and her family have good reason to worry. The Los Angeles Times has reported that some of Trump's wealthy tenants are embarrassed to live in properties with his name on them and would like it to be removed. The paper quoted one saying, "I used to tell people I lived in Trump Place. Now I say I live at 66th and Riverside Boulevard. He has a mouth like a sewer." These are mostly licensing deals, so it may not be possible to change the names until the contracts expire, but it doesn't bode well for new ventures.

As hard as it is to believe considering New York's overheated real estate market, properties with the Trump name are losing value, including those he owns. Broadcaster Keith Olbermann sold his Trump condo last summer. tweeting, "I got out with 90% of my money and 100% of my soul," and told the Los Angeles Times that his neighbors also wanted to sell but couldn't afford to lose the money.

Trump's hotels are suffering, too. Los Angeles Dodgers star Adrian Gonzalez famously refused to stay with the team at the Trump hotel in Chicago during the National League playoffs, in protest against Trump's bigotry. According to New York magazine, the new Trump hotel in Washington, which the candidate has often used his abundant free TV time to advertise, is not doing well. It's had to reduce rates during peak season, and is facing protests and boycotts, along with lawsuits stemming from broken contracts with restaurateurs who want nothing to do with Trump's name. (According to the article, many people predicted that the D.C. hotel would be another Trump failure, so this may be less about his toxic campaign than his usual terrible business sense.)

The folks who go to Trump rallies and buy red Make America Great Again hats and "Monica sucks but not like Hillary" T-shirts may buy a Trump tie for dad's birthday or pick up a pair of Ivanka high heels for their cousin's wedding. But most of Trump's fortune is tied up in luxury properties and licensing deals for people who play golf at his golf clubs, stay in his expensive hotels and buy multimillion-dollar condos in buildings with his name on them. They live in big cities and wealthy suburbs, and many of them are appalled by Trump's crude campaign. They can vote with their pocketbooks, too.

It certainly sounds as if Keith Olbermann could be right when he said, "In Russia, there was quite a spree of pulling down statues of Stalin and erasing his likeness from buildings. That's how the real estate market will treat Trump." When your name is your brand and your brand is your business, people running away from it is a problem. Donald stands to lose a lot more than the election.

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Has Donald Trump destroyed his brand and his business? The GOP nominee stands to lose more than the election

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If the polls hold up and Republican nominee Donald Trump loses the election next month, America will have dodged many bullets. One of them will be the prospect of having a president who thinks he can avoid conflict of interest by turning his privately owned international brand and real estate business over to his children while he's in office.