Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

As of this writing, Maine is bracing for a surge of ICE agents into its cities for another unnecessarily aggressive effort to enforce immigration law, already familiar elsewhere, and the president is busy plotting the conquest of Greenland — another project whose purpose is hard to discern.

Give Donald Trump credit: he knows how to create fear and confusion and sow it widely throughout the world. Yet these headline-grabbing ventures obscure something more important: the unbusinesslike way this administration has operated from day one.

There have been three presidents who can be defined primarily by a background in business. The first was Herbert Hoover; the second was Jimmy Carter.

Hoover was a successful mining engineer who earned acclaim by organizing World War I relief efforts for the government on a scale never seen before. He served as secretary of commerce under Calvin Coolidge and then was elected his Republican successor in 1928.

Unfortunately for this public-spirited citizen, the stock market crashed, the country fell into the Great Depression and Hoover’s business know-how provided no answers. He just assumed this was another of the periodic “panics” and “depressions” that would eventually fix itself.

It took Franklin Roosevelt’s bold experimentation and use of new government programs to finally cure massive unemployment, though his equally skillful preparation for World War II certainly helped. Congress authorized new financial agencies, including the SEC and FDIC, that have prevented any comparable economic slump for nearly a century.

Jimmy Carter was elected as the answer to the corruption of the Nixon administration, which culminated in Watergate and the first and so far only resignation of a president. Trained as a nuclear engineer, Carter rebuilt the family peanut company, and had it thriving when he appropriately put it into a blind trust after being elected president.

His business background was less noticed, but it quickly put him at odds with congressional Democrats, who held huge majorities and wanted to resume the work of the Great Society that was derailed by the Vietnam War and then the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Carter had no sympathy for labor unions, which were already under relentless pressure and were denied the tools to organize new unions in the service sector, rapidly eclipsing manufacturing as a source of new jobs.

Even more crucially, Carter was uninterested in building a national health care system, like all of
our economic partners and allies, to rationalize the partial coverage offered by Lyndon Johnson’s
Medicare and Medicaid programs, which congressional Democrats were willing to do.

Then there’s the present administration. One can charitably describe Trump’s pre-presidential
financial returns, primarily in real estate and casinos, as mixed, but it’s his failure to honor basic
business principles that has become alarming.

No business owner would begin by firing thousands of employees willy-nilly, then unleash a
misnamed Department of Government Efficiency that, after six months of disruption, produced
largely fictitious savings and demoralized whole agencies. Cancelling contracts without warning
or rationale, even when later restored, leaves behind the question of why anyone would want to
do business with this government.

Now Trump has ratcheted up the pressure on the one institution American business has regarded as untouchable: the Federal Reserve. Though its performance during the Great Depression was unfortunate, since then it has learned to manage the money supply skillfully, if not perfectly, and U.S Treasury bonds are still among the safest investments in the world.

Trump is putting all that at risk through his reckless order to open a criminal investigation
against Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. He already knows the reasons for the alleged “crime” — cost overruns on a building project — because he’s discussed them personally with Powell.

Trump appointed Powell in 2017, in part to cure Wall Street jitters over his provocative first-term
moves, and Powell was reappointed by Joe Biden. His current term expires in May, but Trump
may be making it impossible for Congress to confirm a successor with a legal cloud over the
Fed.

Powell pointedly attended Supreme Court arguments Wednesday over Trump’s bid to fire
another Fed governor, Lisa Cook, on similarly flimsy allegations. The court, which has been
wobbly on Trump’s arbitrary firings elsewhere, seems disinclined to allow similar treatment of
the Fed — and also inclined to limit Trump’s punitive and incoherent tariffs.

For a variety of reasons, including bad luck, businessmen have not made successful presidents because they tend to misunderstand the nature of representative government and the institutions
they’re trying to lead. Only Trump, though, has achieved this level of obtuseness, misunderstanding and vengefulness in just one year. From that perspective, Herbert Hoover is looking a lot more appealing.