| It's a longstanding American tradition that many of our politicians are successful businessmen who made a fortune and then used their wealth to finance their political campaign(s). This is more or less how our current president got into power. I think Trump is the only American president who never held a political office before becoming president. He was wealthy and famous for decades as a very successful businessman and he apparently spent many years contemplating running for president. I once wrote a blog post titled something like "The 70 Year Old Political Virgin." I suspect a lot of the drama we see with this presidency is rooted in the fact that he has no prior political experience. He has prior experience with people talking about him because he was rich and wealth is a kind of power, but it's not the same as having real political power where you can command armies and what not. I think this is why he engages in so much inflammatory rhetoric, which isn't appropriate for the President of the US, and I think it's why he seems so thin-skinned about people saying things about him. When he was merely famous for his wealth, people talked about him as gossip, basically. Now, people talk about him because what he says and does impacts their lives in significant ways and he doesn't seem to know how to deal with the fact that this is just part and parcel of holding a powerful office. It's not actually personal. For much of the history of the US, the path to the presidency was rooted in "well, first you need to be a General in the military." From what I gather, that's not been true in recent decades. My father and ex husband were both career military. The military has a culture steeped in ethics surrounding making hard decisions about who lives, who dies, who dies so that others will live, etc. I think it is good experience for taking the reins of power, in part because being the President of the US also makes you the Commander in Chief. Heinlein wrote fiction about a future America where you had to have military service to run for political office. I am not comfortable with suggesting this should be a standard, but I do wonder if we should add a new proviso to the bid for presidency that you either need prior military experience or you need to have held some other political office first. |