Trump’s Turn
Trump’s Turn
In 2023, long before Elon Musk fully endorsed Donald Trump’s election campaign, he outlined the traits he envisioned for the ideal president.
Elon Musk told CNBC, ‘Is he good at getting things done? There are many decisions to be made every day.’
‘He is the CEO of America. We want a good CEO for America.’
Voters have twice elected Trump on the promise that he would act decisively like a CEO and apply his business experience, rather than getting mired in the swamp of Washington politics.
After his victory in the last November election, the phrase ‘Trump is a businessman’ became a four-word slogan among foreign leaders, from Simon Harris, then Prime Minister of Ireland, to Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine. They hoped Trump would use his touted experience in deal-making, such as carefully applying tariffs or putting pressure on Russia.
The President still dresses like American CEOs of the 1990s: older white men in suits and ties.
Since entering the White House in January, he has also acted like those authoritarian and centralized managers, issuing executive orders at an unprecedented speed and volume, avoiding the cumbersome negotiations of the legislative path in Congress.
He has appointed loyal individuals to cabinet positions and senior administrative roles, a move similar to the discretion American CEOs sometimes have when they remain as board chairmen and fill the board with their supporters.
With Elon Musk’s help as head of a department called the Ministry of Doge Productivity, he has implemented radical reforms to cut costs in federal departments and agencies.
However, recently, that mercurial leader from his first term has reappeared.
Just weeks after taking office in 2017, he conducted a swift and clearly un-CEO-like purge among his government members and his chosen staff.
Now, despite his desire to avoid similar critical headlines, a new wave of changes has begun in the second term.
Musk is stepping back from his role in Doge as Trump’s enthusiasm for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, and Musk’s excitement for Trump’s policies, has waned.
Earlier this month, the President dismissed National Security Advisor Mike Waltz after Waltz accidentally added a journalist to a Signal chat group discussing retaliation against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Polls released alongside Trump’s first 100 days in office showed an unusually sharp decline in his popularity.
These rapid changes raise the question of what kind of business leader Trump fundamentally is.
Are there any useful similarities between Trump’s administration and business leadership? Can organizational management and leadership theorists offer insights to help outsiders better understand Trump and his team?
And what are the early signs indicating whether his strategy and leadership style will succeed or fail this time?
Trump, a real estate mogul, was never a typical CEO, and his company was not the kind of organization that management researchers are usually interested in studying.
Nevertheless, he found a special place in the realm of business leadership when Harvard Business School published a case study about him in 2001, as part of an intermittent series titled ‘Doers Profiles.’
HBS case studies are designed to spark classroom discussions among MBA students and other business students and typically delve into real-world business issues in detail.
In the same year, only two other individuals were deemed worthy of such examination: former President Jimmy Carter and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.
In 2007 and 2008, Nelson Mandela and Bill Gates were also added to this list.
Trump’s abridged profile was particularly structured like a game, primarily consisting of a summary of his successes and failures, along with excerpts from his bestselling 1987 book, ‘Trump: The Art of the Deal,’ which was written by another author.
Trump’s entrepreneurial approach is characterized by a disregard for established structures and a ruthless use of power.
Howard Stevenson, one of the authors of this case study and director of the startup curriculum at HBS, provided a definition of entrepreneurship that perfectly aligns with Trump the businessman.
Upon his retirement in 2011, he told Forbes magazine, ‘Entrepreneurship means pursuing opportunities beyond the resources you currently control.’
Speed and energy, disregard for established structures and norms, and ruthless use of power—based on the leader’s charisma and followers’ loyalty—are the hallmarks of Trump’s entrepreneurial approach.
From this perspective, Trump is more like the omnipresent tech entrepreneurs who accompanied him at the inauguration of his second term in January—Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—than a traditional CEO.
While most of Trump’s achievements have not been to the liking of conservatives, conservative analyst David Brooks recently praised the vitality gap Trump has created between himself and his opponents.
He wrote in The New York Times, ‘Throughout his life, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have crushed any non-narcissistic individual, he has always moved on to new projects and conquests.’
From one perspective, the flood of executive orders in Trump’s first 100 days resembles the actions of an active CEO, according to Timothy Dewhirst, a professor of international business at Manchester Business School and author of several articles on populist leadership.
He says, ‘The American system is designed to operate slowly and thoughtfully, and this has been problematic for anyone in an executive position. Executives want to be able to take action. This is the path forward—mobilize the forces, let’s get to work.’
However, Richard Heitner, former advertising executive and founder of the leadership consulting firm Blue Hat Man, likens Trump more to entrepreneurial leaders like Martin Sorrell, an advertising industry giant—those who bypass usual communication channels, sidestep deputies, and announce policies publicly and without warning, just as Trump did with Waltz’s dismissal.
If he continues this trend, Trump may be able to shape the organizational structure to fit his vision rather than adapting himself to the existing structure.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who moved at a similar pace in his first 100 days and implemented the New Deal reforms in the 1930s, provides a model of change management at the presidential level.
Dewhirst also says this situation reminds him of the noisy and brand-based rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s media mogul, to the premiership in the 1990s.
Just like Trump, the charismatic Berlusconi also overcame criminal charges, personal ridicule, and claims of conflict of interest and returned to power despite political failures, becoming Prime Minister three times.
At the end of his first short term as Prime Minister in 1994, Berlusconi told the Financial Times, ‘I am the hero of a revolution. I must act completely differently from my predecessors.’
There are also similarities between Trump’s approach and today’s authoritarian leaders whom Trump admires, such as Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey.
Theorists who specialize in how power is exercised find much to analyze in Trump’s leadership. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford University, criticizes experts who fantasize about what leaders should do instead of carefully examining what leaders actually do.
Pfeffer emphasizes that successful leaders almost always act tactically to gain and use power, whether for good or ill. He teaches a course called ‘Paths to Power’ to teach students how to do the same.
Trump aligns with all the principles Pfeffer outlined in his book ‘The 7 Rules of Power’ (2022). According to Pfeffer, Trump is exceptional only because most people are neither willing nor able to act so extremely.
The clearest example is Trump’s ascension to the U.S. presidency by breaking norms and employing Pfeffer’s last and most important rule: success justifies almost everything.
In this process, Trump shapes the behavior of his followers, who are ready to forgive or forget how that power was obtained for personal gain.
Pfeffer points to South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in his book, who previously called Trump a race-baiting, xenophobic, and extremist but later became one of his most loyal supporters.
In 2019, when asked about this change of stance, he told The New York Times, ‘It would be strange not to change because up here, I have the opportunity to work with the President to achieve good outcomes for the country.’
Similarly, Pfeffer says, Trump’s advisors in his second term know that those who opposed him in the first term were completely sidelined from the government. You must keep your boss happy, and if keeping him happy means constantly praising him, that’s what you’ll do.
But this situation cannot continue indefinitely. Pfeffer presents a business example: the rise and fall of the minivan, the very vehicle that Lee Iacocca, Chrysler’s CEO and one of Trump’s admired figures, used to revive the company in the 1980s, but by 2000, the market was saturated, and demand had peaked.
So, what do leadership theories say about whether Trump’s leadership market could essentially reach a saturation point?
Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University and a longtime observer of organizations, says successful entrepreneurs build teams, but I don’t see a team here, especially in Trump’s second term. Unlike great entrepreneurs, he places loyalty above competence and prefers praise of his leadership over constructive criticism.
The recent dismissal of Waltz is attributed to his extremism, which was incompatible with the MAGA ideology, as well as his misuse of the Signal app. That incident could logically have led to the dismissal of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but his loyalty has kept him in place for now.
Some of Trump’s supporters claim that the President has assembled a team of rivals, a title originally used for Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, which included politicians who had previously competed against him.
Trump’s inner circle also includes former critics like Vice President J.D. Vance or opponents like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but as a group, they are more like those who unconditionally approve.
The cabinet meeting held last month to commemorate the 100th day of the presidency is a telling example. Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, said during this televised session, ‘Mr. President, your performance in the first 100 days has surpassed any other presidency in this country. I’ve never seen anything like it. Thank you.’
Instead of challenging Trump, they seem more likely to fall into the trap of groupthink, the kind of cozy collective decision-making that psychologist Irving Janis described in the 1970s, and which boards and cabinets have since tried to avoid.
Barbara Kellerman, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, wrote a book about Trump’s first term called ‘The Enablers,’ an analysis of Trump’s tribe’s behavior—including his voters and his team at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. She says her definition is still one hundred thousand percent true: enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in destructive behaviors and continue them.
According to Kellerman, the sycophantic attitude of Trump’s close advisors in the second term is a repeat of what we saw in the first term—except that in the first term, there were constraints and checks.
With such unconditional support, Trump can freely exercise a power that the famous early 20th-century sociologist Max Weber called charismatic authority, a form of power not based on law and bureaucracy but on the unconditional support of followers.
Weber’s ideas later played a role in shaping the concept of transformational leaders—leaders who inspire their followers to achieve goals beyond their imagination. In the business world, Musk’s and Bezos’s ambitious goal-setting are modern examples of this type of leadership.
In this context, the simultaneous presence of two charismatic leaders—Trump and Musk—in the White House was unpleasant and tense from the start.
Weber writes in his classic work ‘Economy and Society’ (1922) that what validates charismatic authority is its recognition by followers. This recognition is freely given and is usually guaranteed by what is considered miraculous, manifesting in forms such as hero worship or absolute trust in the leader.
Trump’s insistence that his life was saved by divine intervention during last year’s assassination attempt is a clear example of this.
His exaggerated and narcissistic claim in a recent interview with The Atlantic, where he said, ‘In my second term, I will run the country and the world,’ also fits precisely within this framework.
Trump’s presidency can be seen as a theatrical and television show like ‘The Apprentice,’ where narrative twists—who gets fired and ultimately who gets hired—are set to capture the audience’s attention, with the camera repeatedly returning to the invincible boss.
The appointment of Fox News hosts Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and recently Jeanine Pirro, known as Judge Jeanine, as interim District Attorney of Columbia seems to confirm this perception.
Meanwhile, the new emphasis on Rococo-style opulence in the Oval Office of the White House reinforces the sense of an emperor or king at the height of splendor and grandeur.
A real business assessment of this CEO Trump would be much harsher. Richard Heitner, former advertising executive, says this is a CEO who quickly performed below the manifesto with which he came to this position. In the corporate world, I don’t know if he would still be in his post if he were in such a position.
Transformational leaders contrast with transactional leaders, who have everyday, short-term goals to get things done and rarely lead to significant long-term changes.
Herminia Ibarra, a professor at London Business School, points out that when individuals tie their identity to transformational leadership, it becomes difficult for them to back down. This identity tie causes commitment to Trump to intensify even when his behavior becomes more unjustifiable.
The question is whether Trump has the patience and ability to delegate—traits that distinguish successful entrepreneurial leaders from others.
Trump has previously shown that he wants to be at the center of every deal, even in details like tariff negotiations with countries. Mintzberg says he makes all the decisions himself and does everything himself, which can be seen in the most extreme form of micromanagement—for example, appointing himself as the head of the Kennedy Center, Washington’s arts hub.
Transformational and charismatic leaders create instability, which is why they need bureaucratic structures to give their ideas tangible form—what Weber called routinization.
Neither Musk nor Bezos could achieve their goals, which defy the laws of gravity, whether in SpaceX and Tesla or Blue Origin and Amazon, without having a strong organizational base to turn their revolutionary ideas into practical routines.
Trump has his transactional aspects, as seen in numerous deals, but the chaos created by Musk and Doge, along with new signs indicating that managerial order in the White House is again weakening, suggests a potential serious weakness.
Dewhirst points out that a strategy based on a strong brand may collapse when the brand itself is damaged.
The collapse of the reputable accounting firm Arthur Andersen, once its contradictory relations with Enron, the energy company damaged by fraud, were exposed in 2001, is a classic example of this issue.
If failures begin to tarnish the Trump brand, these failures will inevitably stick to Trump. In the final stage, according to the laws of power, loyalists can rise against the leader. Pfeffer believes that when politicians realize that the risk of continuing to let Trump get away with what he does is greater than the risk of facing him, they will change their behavior.
Kellerman adds that when kings truly rule, they rule by divine right. God has chosen them to rule, and they had absolute power.
In recent weeks, she has observed changes in sentiment. The reality is that we are now seeing more resistance, and negative polls across the country. This is like no king. You are seeing pressures on Trump. You will start to see cracks.