One of the things that’s always stuck with me from first reading about Trump all the way back in 2016 was how he ran his businesses. Because the Trump Organization is pretty big, you might assume that it’s run like a generic Big Business, with a large bureaucracy and so on. The sort of arrangement which at least superficially resembles government bureaucracies. But the truth, as I understand it, is that Trump runs things much more like an extremely large family firm, without clear chains of command, etc. The result is apparently chaotic, since his Organization is basically a family business which has been scaled up to the absolute breaking point of that model, and is perhaps only sustainable with the outside subsidies Trump gets from his semi-separate (and more successful) status as a celebrity.

For a long while, I just thought of this fact as another mark against him. Trump was using his status as a “famous businessman” in order to con voters into thinking that he had the appropriate sort of experience to run a government, when really his business was run completely differently, and not that well. (And it’s very clear he tries to run the White House the same way, with even worse results.) But reflecting on it now I think there’s an important point I missed back then. Lots of people have pointed out the connection between the petite bourgeoisie (small business owners, basically) and fascism, or right wing authoritarianism more broadly. When I wrote that series of posts on Trump’s support in 2016 I found something similar in his voters. (For a quick sketch of some of these people, you can read this by Patrick Wyman.)

From the perspective of smaller business owners, I think you can see why Trump’s particular management style might be seen as an advantage, rather than an obvious weakness for someone trying to run a bureaucracy with millions of workers. He’s one of them! He shares their concerns, or at least he shares their mindset, localist and paterfamilial. He doesn’t run some vast conglomerate, he runs a specific set of properties with his name on them, just like they do. He is at the apex of their world, at the limit of what can be achieved without transforming your business into something else. And the fact that he didn’t do that is further proof that he’s innately one of them. You could imagine a different Donald Trump inheriting that same business and deciding to expand it, to try to make it into this big corporation competing with like Hyatt. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, make that leap. And so Trump could easily become the avatar of a certain class of business owner - not necessarily “small”, but rooted, and less dematerialized/managerial.

The other sorts of business owners might be willing to support him for the sake of tax cuts and other typical Republican priorities, but there was always condescension at Trump’s uncouthness - a union of convenience, not love. Others have pointed out that Trump’s offensive behavior functions as a proof of his opposition to the current order. He’s burning his bridges with them preemptively, so there’s no chance of him later selling out, which appeals to voters who feel like their leaders keep selling them out. I would suggest Trump’s limited business acumen functions similarly, as evidence that he’s the right sort of businessman, not the unwanted “elite” kind. For a counterpoint, you can think of Mitt Romney, who is clearly a superior manager to Trump, but whose business experience was in like consulting and investment, the exact opposite, so it’s no surprise that his constituency (and his personal mindset) was totally different. Differences which tend to get obscured when “business” is talked about as a single entity.