“Sounds like a pretty good analysis to me! Actually, it sounds positively BRILLIANT. And the sort of thing only a successful BUSINESSMAN could pull off! (Which is why we voted for him!)” ~ Dick Bachert
(We don’t know whom to credit for this great piece of insight.)
The Age Old Hatchet Man Story
“Apparently, liberals and never-Trumpers are so isolated in their political circles that they have no concept how things work in the real world of business and corporate America. For example, they completely fail to grasp the concept of the “hatchet man.”
Allow me to explain:
Say you are a business tycoon. You just successfully completed a large-scale acquisition and merger, bringing together multiple smaller companies into one conglomerate. After the merger, you want to put your own people in charge of everything. However, all those smaller companies had their own executives – and, at least for the short term – you need to keep many of them around the keep things running. So, you keep many of those executives around and let them retain their own senior staff. You even appoint one of them – the head of the largest of the companies you acquired – to be the CEO of the conglomerate, and he pledges to get all the departments working together harmoniously.
After a transition period, some of them are doing fine in the new conglomerate – but others are clearly causing trouble. In fact, the one you appointed CEO is clearly a disaster. The newly merged departments are working against each other.
Furthermore, you have a good suspicion he is dealing in insider trading – nothing you can take to a prosecutor, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence building up. Worse, he is not only doing his own dirty dealing, but it appears he may even be leaking intellectual property to your competitors, helping them take market share from you.
Clearly, he has to go – and go now.
Problem is, many of the senior employees in your conglomerate are loyal to him. If you just fire him and put in your own chosen CEO, you know you could get a lot of backlash from disgruntled employees. And in your business, there is such a small profit margin that you really can’t afford anything at all that threatens performance. So what do you do?
In comes the hatchet man.
The hatchet man is someone you bring in for the sole purpose of slashing the problems and shaking things up over a very short period of time – but doing it in a way that deflects any blame or blowback away from you. As soon as the problems are hacked away, the hatchet man leaves – taking the ire and resentment with him and leaving you free to bring in your new team for a fresh start.
This happens in the business world all the time. And Donald Trump is a businessman. He knows this. He has lived this. We’ve seen him do it on “The Apprentice.” We’ve read about it in his books. This is not a surprise to anyone. Except for liberals and never-Trumpers.
Enter Scaramucci.
Liberals and never-Trumpers see the past two weeks as proof of a Hitler-clown-circus spectacle, as evidence that Trump is unhinged and our government is in the hands of madmen. Anyone who understands the business world and Donald Trump fully understands that what we just witnessed was a perfectly executed hatchet man maneuver.
When Trump won the election, he essentially performed the political equivalent of an acquisition and merger. He brought together different political factions – establishment Republicans, conservatives, tea party, religious right, moderates, independents, cross-overs – into one winning political coup. For some, it was a hostile takeover – and if they were going to be dragged in against their will, they would sure as hell resist.
This is where Reince Priebus came in.
Priebus, as the then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, was hired as White House Chief of Staff to be a sort of post-merger CEO. It was his job to bring all these political factions together and get them to work harmoniously. But he failed. Worse, there is ample evidence to suggest he not only failed but worked against Trump and the Trump agenda. Look at the leaks. Look at all the chaos. Look at all the bureaucracy continuing to work at odds with the president. Priebus – and a number of other people around him – had to go.
Back to Scaramucci.
Donald Trump has known for some time that Priebus was a disaster. He was going to give him his six-month trial period – that’s a fairly common thing in the private sector. After that, heads were going to roll. But Trump himself doesn’t want to be the hatchet man. He needs to be able to lead after the bloodbath. So what does he do? He turns to an old friend he has known for many years – someone with nothing to lose, someone who can step in with a hatchet and hack away, someone who can then just walk away from it all and leave the slate clean. He turned to Scaramucci.
So what does Scaramucci do? He comes in swinging. He fires a few people to make a quick example. He tells others they can “resign” right now if they want to – but if not, they will be fired. Others see what is going on and just up and quit of their own accord.
That problem CEO, Priebus? Oh, the new “structure” of the organization puts Scaramucci in direct competition with Priebus – and Priebus throws up his hands and says “fine, I’m out of here.” And Scaramucci does it all in a way that is spectacularly visible to draw all the fire from Trump critics.
So how does it all end? It ends with Trump putting in his new CEO – the one he probably wanted from day one but held back – and the new CEO says “OK, Scaramucci – you are no longer needed here.”
Gen. Kelly now has a clean slate to start fresh – and Scaramucci takes all the heat. Where the left and never-Trumpers see a circus freak-show, realists from the business world see a perfectly executed post-merger hatchet-man job.
The political wonks see Kelly taking command as the first sane thing to happen in this administration. They don’t realize they’ve been played, and played perfectly. And soon we will likely see some other changes that move the Executive Branch further towards what Trump has wanted from day one. And then watch the real swamp-drainer get to work. It sucks to be Hillary Clinton right now…
Oh, and Scaramucci? He gets a sweet deal out of all this – no doubt, he and his friend Donald Trump talked it all out first.
Scaramucci was already facing a nasty divorce that would result in the liquidation of his business to divide assets. A little-known law allows people who are legally required to sell a business as a condition of employment in the Executive Branch (to prevent conflicts of interest) to defer the taxes on their profits from the sale.
Scaramucci was going to have to sell his company anyway due to his pending divorce. Now he and his soon-to-be ex-wife just saved $80 million in taxes. So don’t think for a moment all this was an unplanned mess that went awry. Scaramucci and Trump knew exactly what they were doing.
All of this was planned – and foreseen. Not just by me, but by others as well.
Scott Adams wrote before Trump was inaugurated that, to his critics, the first year of Trump would be a play in three acts:
Act One – Trump is literally Hitler.
Act Two – Trump is not literally Hitler, but Trump is incompetent.
Act Three – Trump is not incompetent, but we don’t like his policies.
We’ve seen this play out. From election night up through the first 100 days, the left was out rioting and acting as though Trump taking office was literally the end of Western Civilization.
But after 100 days, when Trump had failed to do evil-dictator things like round up all the brown people and put the gays into camps and force women to stay home and have babies, it became farcical to continue the “Trump is Hitler” narrative.
And so from that 100 day point up until now, it has been the “Trump is incompetent” game. Look at all the chaos. Look at all the leaking. Look at all the tweets. Now, we begin Act Three. With Priebus out and Kelly in, things will settle down. Pretty soon, all the left will have to say is “we just don’t like Trump’s policies.”…Act Three.
And once that happens, the left is dead; because Trump’s policies are policies that most Americans actually agree with. We should put America first. Build back our economy. Create jobs. Strengthen the military. Protect the border. Outside a few densely-populated liberal strongholds like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and – of course – Washington, D.C., Americans, in general, agree with all of this. So when all the left has to say is “Trump’s policies are wrong,” the left will literally be telling most of America, “You people are stupid.”
Much of this essay is plausible, the last paragraph is pure wishful thinking. The battle between the Republicans and Democrats will be tight and tough and the winner next time will win narrowly and likely by the electoral college. Any political party that virtually owns the liberal media in all its facets down to Hollywood, the music industry, virtually all the newspapers and TV outlets are going to have a crushing weight on what happens in America. Easy, glib answers are not going to defeat them. Democrats are bleeding because of the weight of the voters in the country, outside the big cities. One socialist newspaper commented on an Arkansas county where 90 percent of the people voted for Trump. That’s killing the Democratic Party. They are just a socialist cabal and that’s all they ever will be if the country gets smart and it is.