I've worked for federal contractors, so I know how stringent and neutral the procurement process is. But why bother when you can get free airtime on Fox News and convince the President to personally intervene in contract awards on your behalf? #Trump https://t.co/qwiXsmmrpk
— ***Dave Hill (@Three_Star_Dave) May 24, 2019
I’ve worked for federal contractors, so I know how stringent and neutral the procurement process is. But why bother when you can get free airtime on Fox News and convince the President to personally intervene in contract awards on your behalf? #Trump https://t.co/qwiXsmmrpk
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it (too many times) again: Donald Trump sees no difference between being President of the United States and being the head of his own privately held company. If he gets an idea in his head, whether spontaneous or instilled there by someone, he wants action take RIGHT NOW, and just what he wants. The ideas of personal constraints, tradition, regulation, or the law mean little to him — they are only obstacles for his lackies to overcome to serve him as he wants to be served.
The federal procurement process is lengthy, complex, and onerous, but it is 100% designed to do exactly what Donald Trump does not want: to be utterly neutral, fair, and immune to influence and corruption. It is by no means perfect, even in this, but that is its goal, to ensure that our tax dollars are spent, not on something that will enrich a friend or reward an ally, but on the best product / service that meets the exhaustively described parameters.
So, of course, Donald is perfectly happy to ignore that and put his thumb on the scales, influenced by an insidiously clever campaign on all the news outlets he sees, unable to understand why he can’t just say, “I like that guy, and that product,” and have the coffers open up to make it so. Process is for bureaucrats, regulation is for the weak — when you’re the smartest guy in the room and the most powerful, why can’t it just be the way you want it?
That, in and of itself, is bad enough. The inevitable icing on the cake is when someone figures out how to exploit that impulse.
Yeah, it didn’t quite work here. So far. Where else has it worked that we don’t know of (or have already forgotten in this shit-show administration)? Where else will it be tried? And does anyone really think that Donald Trump has absorbed and accepted the lesson ‘”that the president could not just pick a company” to get the contract in defiance of the federal procurement process”?
Do you want to know more? How one company used a Fox-centric PR strategy to try to get Trump to give it a lucrative federal contract