The "Trump Is A Businessman Defense" Highlights That Broader Problem In Our Society

There is an interesting thread behind much of the Republican defense of Donald Trump that I think speaks to a larger issue that pervades certain problems in our society today. The defense relies on the fact that Donald Trump is a businessman and he treats the rest of the government as though they were just his employees. And, because of this business attitude, this gives Trump license to not only ignore the institutional norms of our government but makes it almost OK to ignore certain legal requirements simply because he's the boss.

Francis Rooney, a Republican Representative from Florida, expressed this attitude in his interview with Chris Hayes tonight. He described Trump's asking Comey for loyalty as just a search for the intrinsic values that he would want in any employee. He also dismissed Trump's request that Comey "let this go", meaning the investigation of Flynn, as just the boss saying to Comey that I've already fired the guy so there's no need to continue to pursue him for his activities. For Rooney, the fact that the employee, in this case Flynn, had possibly broken the law was meaningless. Flynn's being fired was more than enough punishment even if he had broken the law.

Ross Douthat tweeted something similar as his response to Comey's opening statement, saying, "Trump's weird behavior re: Comey seems to reflect a man accustomed to being a boss, unprepared to be a president". Again, this implies that potentially impeding on ongoing investigation about one of your employees is just something bosses do all the time. Sadly, I think that is more true than Douthat wants or intends to believe.

It is a bizarre attitude that simply having a business background means that there are certain legal standards that you are somehow allowed to ignore. You and I may think it bizarre, but it is a far too common attitude in US corporate management these days. You see it in the massive mortgage fraud, both in the origination and foreclosure phases, in the financial fraud involving interest and currency rates, in the banking fraud epitomized by Wells Fargo, in the pharmaceutical industry, and a hundred other examples I could detail.

At some point, largely helped by the concept of the primacy of shareholder value and the Republicans obsession with "job creators", business became entirely divorced from the larger goals of our constitutional rule of law and society in general.  Business leaders today think they live in an environment that has an entirely different set of rules than those that constrain our government and our society. They have lost sight of the role that business was supposed to play in attaining the goals of our society as a whole. And we are all, with the exception of the handful at the top, literally and figuratively worse off because of that.