The Patriot Post® · Accountability
I can just picture the scene. It’s the early ‘80s and I’m running a mergers and acquisitions group for a major Wall Street investment bank. It’s a bit of the Wild Wild West with leveraged buyouts, junk bonds and hostile tender offers dominating the landscape and deals closing every day. One of my managing directors comes into my office for a chat. After a few pleasantries, he informs me that the three med tech deals he has been working on forever weren’t going to close on time. He says he tried really hard (he’d never tried harder) but simply couldn’t get all the players to agree even though they had all told him for years that this was exactly what they wanted to do.
But then he tells me I shouldn’t be concerned and certainly shouldn’t be upset with him. I should take a closer look at how difficult it is to get med tech deals across the finish line, since only a couple of the several hundred deals I have been involved in were in that field. And when I’ve finished doing that, I should reconsider how I am evaluating his performance and judge him only after the next two fiscal years of our firm were in the books. Just because he had everything going for him, and deal negotiations back then had a half-life of days or weeks, it wasn’t his fault. That’s just not how the business works. And as he got up to leave the office, he stopped for a second, turned around and said, “Oh, and by the way, I’m taking the next month off.”
Fast forward to this week and the transcript from the Mitch McConnell interview, which I thought at first was an SNL parody of Congress. I know Trump tweeted back at him, but his initial thought had to be that he was not in Kansas anymore. If you ever wanted Exhibit A of why Trump caught fire with an electorate fed up with DC, this is it. To the DC establishment, kicking the can down the road to the only thing that matters — the next election (“judge me in two years”) — is perfectly normal. For working Americans it is just the opposite. There tends to be a tad more urgency and a ton more accountability in the real world.
Trump is trying to change all that and bring some business discipline and responsibility to the table, and the DC establishment doesn’t like it one bit. The arrogance of McConnell’s lecturing Trump for having the nerve to want to get something done in time to matter for the American people is truly breathtaking and reinforces the belief that DC is there to be, not do, something. The battle lines have been clearly drawn; too bad they are not only between the GOP (which by the way controls everything) and the Dems but also between Trump and the GOP establishment swamp.
The McConnell comments would never have happened if he thought Trump had the power to “fire” him, namely the clout to influence Kentucky voters to see the light. But he may have that dead wrong if Trump can put a couple wins on the polling scoreboard, and the most likely candidate would be a simple reduction in business tax rates, period — forget the comprehensive fiddling with deductions and personal rates for now; just get a win that will turn the polls — which would be very tough for anyone in the GOP to run away from.
My response to my theoretical managing director would have been very presidential: YOU’RE FIRED! With more failures like not replacing Obamacare and a few more Trump wins, McConnell may find himself in the same spot.