Performance Review & Performance Improvement Plan: Donald J. Trump

Executive summary: Now in the fourth and final year of your current contract, we find your performance concerning leadership during the Covid 19 pandemic unacceptable. As we have discussed in previous annual performance reviews, this is the most important year to demonstrate strength of leadership and competence of management in order to setup a renewal of your contract. Unfortunately you have mis-handled the Covid 19 crisis so badly that you are not benefitting from the natural leadership windfall that any leader in place at the time should receive. Your stock should be soaring at this point. Even mere average performance during crisis scenarios would have been sufficient. Look at how even G.W. Bush fared during 9/11. An adept leader during crisis should not only be cheered, but should also be able to capitalize on increased support to further his policy agenda, cementing his legacy. You are wasting this disaster…breaking one of the golden rules of leadership. At this point, we conclude that it will be all but impossible for you to recover and maintain your hold on your business. Therefore in order to try to salvage a portion of the major investment made by our enterprise into your business, we must consider termination prior to your normal contract expiration.

General discussion: Donald, we anticipate that this performance assessment may come as a shock given that your previous performance reviews, while increasingly critical of some aspects of your management skills, acknowledged the successes you achieved earlier in your tenure. To be fair, we recruited you for this role about eight years ago, as your predecessor was finishing the first term of his two term contact. We saw you then as a promoter who operated with considerable tenacity to successfully promote illogical business concepts and unsupportable conspiracy theories. The consumers of your market were desperately seeking a target for the pain they were feeling. You impressed us with your ability to tap into this pain, even though you feel none of it yourself, and promote fear. We saw you create a vision for your market of a future in which their current pain was likely to be magnified. You stoked that fear and we observed your consumers shutting down their rational thought processes in favor of the more instinctual processes of survival. It was this ability that we saw in you to lead through promotion, to create consumers who would buy what you put in front of them, that lead us to recruit you in the first place. As we shared with you during our recruitment discussions, albeit tongue in cheek, we suggested your consumers would be willing to support you even if you did something like shooting somebody on Fifth avenue…

After accepting our offer, you needed to garner enough market share to win the business from your competitors. In our assessment, none of your competitors had clued into the deep vein of latent, tribal hostility that you had tapped into with your consumers. When sufficiently stoked, consumers enter into tribal chant mode, cheering even the most inane and childish name-calling tactics that you effectively wielded as eviscerating weapons, leaving your competitors lying in pools of their own blood, stunned.

Having won the necessary market share through a technicality, you started off with a huge advantage as a result of the enterprises’ investment. As we shared early on, management teams like yours traditionally relied on their internal marketing department for negative intel on competitors, known as opposition research. In our view, this approach is flawed on two counts. First, marketing departments are light-weights when is comes to producing institutional quality intel. Secondly, the targets are wrong. We taught you that if a leader uses high quality negative intel on their own lieutenants instead of on their competitors, the leader will have a group of direct reports who will support anything he wants and break rules on his behalf…a much more effective use of intel. The result of this strategy will be that the leader can get more of his agenda completed and without having to watch his own back, as most leaders must. With the ensuing track record of success, competitors fade away. Lucky for you, the professional intel unit of our enterprise was made available to provide all the negative intel needed to ‘turn’ all of the officials, Senators and Congressmen, of your business. Therefore, from your first day in the role, you have had the luxury of having unwavering support from the officers under your logo.

However, as we shared in our first year review of your performance, your initial management decisions in creating a team left much to be desired. As you know, we insisted that the really key positions be experienced men, primarily former high ranking military. Our enterprise favors military culture. But left to your own devices, you filled less important slots with weak, former competitors. Understandable if you are an insecure leader. Then you went down a very troubling path. You surrounded yourself with your children; stupid sons, vapid daughter, and smarmy son-in-law, actually proposing to grant them real responsibility in your C-suite. It was quite apparent how unprepared you were for the role. You will recall we discussed this at some length during your first year, how you seemed to be following the script of a second-rate Hollywood mafia don. So we required that you get back on course.

During the next couple of years, with few real leadership demands, you were able to get a certain amount of our agenda completed, primarily by turning the judiciary in a partisan direction and by hollowing out your department of State. To be fair, with the legislative power the enterprise created for you, this was viewed as a minimal return on our investment…but a start.

Unfortunately, during this same period, we observed that rather than growing into the demands of the role as we had hoped and instructed, you demonstrated complete managerial ineptitude. This was such a surprise for us, and we conclude that we made grave mistakes with you. Donald, you have become a caricature of a leader, an oddly colored creature that would only be found in dystopian movies… Something like the cartoonish Batman villains. You have no subtlety, you play out your shallow machinations in plain sight. Your tendency to blatantly lie is legend. This is all so incongruous with the expected norms and customs of our enterprise where cold, calculating intelligence is table stakes and our leaders keep their important cards close to the their vests. No surprise that almost all of the talent that we helped initially to cloak you with has fled, or you have pompously used your ridiculous line, ‘You’re fired!’. You have soiled your leadership brand so much that no one of even marginal talent would come within your radiation zone. So much so that even your ‘owned’ legislators can’t stomach supporting your parade of sub-standard relief pitchers, leaving you with no choice but to default on the Cabinet approval process and build a circus of ‘Acting’ supporting cast members for your reality show.

Now let’s address the fatal flaw, your failure to lead during a real crisis. You’ve proven that you don’t read, certainly not your own intel reports. This also is anathema to our enterprise. Any mid-level leader should be a master of information. But not you, Donald. We get it that you don’t trust your intel dept…they are not beholden to you. But only a fool refuses to read and understand intel. You are the case that proves the point. In this crisis Donald, once again, you were caught with your pants down. When a leader is caught wrong-footed in the initial phase of a crisis, a good leader roars back with overwhelming response to get on top of the wave. You on the other hand, ignored the wave, spent your time waving at fans on the beach and were smacked down by the wave. As you have tried to hoist your girth back out of the surf to stand up, another wave meets you. Bottom line, as real business people say, your business is the richest, most powerful on earth…and the results for this crisis are the worst. That is the ultimate scorecard while you self-rate your performance, insultingly, as a 10 out of 10.

We demand authoritative leaders, Donald. An authoritative leader would have grabbed the reins and driven the wagon. In contrast, instead of wielding the full power we provided, you spent your time continuing to preach to the 35 % of your consumers who already sing in your choir. We get it that your primary supporters abhor centralized power. It is ironic that your opponents are much more comfortable with strong, central leadership. Donald, you had the perfect chance to consolidate power and become a true leader with authority, had you the intelligence to see what was happening months before it hit and the confidence to act. During a real crisis, even the rigid idealogues within your foundation of support would have begrudgingly accepted. A crisis only gives one chance and now your lack of national leadership is laid bare.

Donald, we can’t see you turning this around. We made it clear that if you stopped the clown show and started leading there was a chance. The clock is ticking. You have 30 days to prove a substantive change in your leadership behavior. We must see significant improvement in your probability of keeping the business. Otherwise, we go to plan B. Your second in command doesn’t have your promoter genius, but he seems effective as an actual manager and if we are going to salvage anything from our considerable investment, we are prepared to make a change quickly. With your second in charge, we still see keeping the business as unlikely, but at least not a lost cause like we see if you continue to self destruct.

Donald, we are going to react badly to anything other than ‘Yes sir’

Employee comments: I understand. Give me a little more time. I won’t disappoint you Vlad.