No. of Recommendations: 7
The main thing he is/was good at is licensing his name. And role playing a hard-ass on The Apprentice. I don't think either of those skills are going to benefit America from his perch as President.
I think this overly minimizes the considerable political skills he's demonstrated in his ten years in public life. He's an enormously capable self-marketer - astonishingly adept at harvesting free media, cultivating an image of himself among his customers/supporters, and recognizing far better than most what media channels are effective in this day and age at reaching his target audience. Democrats probably don't credit it, since he's not speaking to their audience - but he's better at comms than many other modern politicians. He's also fantastic at the "sharp elbows" style of politics - we disparage that today as being "autocratic," but it's been practiced by successful politicians for time immemorial (legendarily, LBJ was a noted arm-twister).
What he hasn't shown himself to have is a good sense of how the federal government actually is structured. It's not a private business where the President is an analog to the CEO, and where you can entirely change what the federal government does just by winning your single election. That complicates your ability to get the government to do what you want it to do, and you have to be adept at working within those constraints.
He was not adept at so doing during his first term. It remains to be seen whether he will have improved. How (or if) he manages the current divide in Congress over reconciliation strategy will be instructive.
