I report, you decide. Donald Trump has suggested that Carly Fiorina doesn’t have the face of an American President. He doesn’t comment, though, on whether he has the hair of an American President.
More importantly, though, Trump also has insisted, of his four business bankruptcies, that they were just
routine corporate deals allowed by law and repeated by “many, many others on top of the business world.”
I anticipate that, in tonight’s debate, he’ll attack Fiorina’s record at Hewlett-Packard (yes, the debate is expected to center on foreign policy. For good or ill, Trump has never stayed on script). What he’ll carefully not mention though, is that HP didn’t go bankrupt—it prospered heavily during an economic downturn—while Fiorina led the company. HP has never gone bankrupt.
Neither Fiorina’s HP nor any other stage of HP’s history has the corporation even had to hide behind the euphemism of “routine corporate deals.” Fiorina’s HP is not one of those “many, many others on top of the business world.”
Our country can’t afford to go bankrupt* once, much less four times.
*Yes, yes, I know the nation can’t go bankrupt in a legal sense, it can print dollars to its heart’s content. But doing so is an admission of functional bankruptcy even if not of legal bankruptcy.
And then there’s Argentina – the model of “routine business deals” applied at the country level.