The Day I Went Head-To-Head With Donald Trumphttp://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/08/19/the-day-i-went-head-to-head-with-donald-trump/Aug 19, 2016
Thomas C. Stewart
Mr. Stewart is a retired New York investment banker and a former U.S. Naval Attack Commander who flew combat during the Gulf War.Whenever I hear someone complain that Donald Trump is “not presidential,” I reply, “Compared to whom? Which president are we talking about? How ‘presidential’ was Barack Obama in 2008 when he said of the Republicans, ‘If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun’?”
And just what are the qualities that really matter in a president?
The overwhelming majority of Mr. Trump’s detractors have never sat across the table from him to hammer out a multimillion-dollar business deal. I have. So I think I’m in a better position than they are to judge his effectiveness as a top-level executive.
Because of the duty of confidentiality that I owe to my clients and to the other members of the negotiating team, I can’t give specific details on the project that was discussed at the meeting. But I can share my own impressions on what it was like to deal directly with Mr. Trump.
The first thing I noticed about Mr. Trump was that he was a stickler for detail. As a politician, he may affect a breezy platform style, but in the office, he was all business. Right off the bat, he corrected my team’s estimates of future financing requirements. He must have phoned an expert minutes before the meeting, because he said that by the latest market information he had, our current interest rates were off by 0.1%.
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