Trump: A Man Who Never Finishes Anything
Professor Harold Hill Becomes President
Are we witnessing a remake of the “Music Man” starring our beloved President Donald Trump playing the role of Professor Harold Hill?
Donald Trump has always loved beginnings. He loves the cameras, the drama, the suspense, the feeling of unveiling something “big.” He loves the moment when he can declare that everything before him was a disaster and that he alone can fix it. What he has never shown — in business or politics — is the discipline, patience, and commitment required to finish what he starts.
And now, as he rushes to claim a quick victory in Ukraine while Gaza remains unstable and Iran grows more volatile, the world is once again grappling with the consequences of a leader who cares far more about announcing solutions than building them.
Trump’s real governing philosophy, such as it is, can be summarized in one sentence:
He wants credit for starting everything, and responsibility for finishing nothing.
And when something actually does succeed — often despite him, not because of him — he’s the first to claim he made it happen.
This is not an insult. It is a pattern — consistent, documented, and visible across four decades.
It’s the same con Harold Hill ran in “The Music Man”: blow into town with grand promises, collect money up front, generate excitement about transformation, then disappear before anyone realizes the instruments never arrived and no one learned to play. And if by some miracle a few kids do learn an instrument? Harold takes credit for the whole concert.
Trump has spent his career doing exactly this. He took credit for a booming economy that began under Obama. He claimed he “rebuilt the military” using budget increases that were already in motion. He signed a veterans’ healthcare bill and boasted about it for years — even though the core legislation was passed under his predecessor. When COVID vaccines were developed by scientists working around the clock, he treated it as a personal achievement and branded it “Operation Warp Speed,” as if the scientists needed his logo to do their work.
The pattern is always the same. He has neither the patience nor the talent to build anything of consequence.
The Businessman Who Cashed In Up Front and Walked Away
Long before he entered politics, Trump perfected a business model built around front-loaded profit and back-end collapse.
He launched casinos with fanfare and left them in bankruptcy court. He opened Trump University with promises of transformation and left students with lawsuits. He sold his name to buildings he never managed. He opened airlines, mortgage companies, bottled water lines, magazines, and steak brands — all of which evaporated after the initial burst of publicity.
The trick was always the same:
Get the licensing fee.
Get the media coverage.
Declare victory.
Leave others holding the losses.
Finishing things requires competence and sustained effort. Trump’s model required neither.
The President Who Governed by Slogan
When Trump moved into politics, he took this same psychology with him.
He promised to “repeal and replace Obamacare.”
He never produced a replacement plan. Not in 2017. Not in 2018. Not ever. Not even now, in 2025 — eight years after the promise.
The Republican Party controlled the House, Senate, and White House, and still nothing happened because Trump had never bothered to do the work of understanding health policy or negotiating within his own coalition. When the repeal effort collapsed, he blamed Congress and walked away.
The pattern repeated again and again.
North Korea
Historic summit. Dramatic handshake. Zero denuclearization. The nuclear program expanded.
Afghanistan
A peace deal with the Taliban — announced with great fanfare. No enforcement mechanism. No sustainable framework. The system collapsed the moment U.S. support ended, leaving the next administration to execute a withdrawal from an unworkable agreement.
China Trade War
Dramatic tariffs announced with great fanfare. No strategy for what happens when China retaliates. No understanding of America’s own vulnerabilities.
His initial “Liberation Day” tariff announcement — the kind of sweeping policy declaration that would earn a high school student a D- for lack of research, unclear objectives, and no consideration of unintended consequences — perfectly captured his approach: bold pronouncements with no underlying analysis.
Farmers suffered. Supply chains fractured. And years later, he’s still struggling just to get back to square one — the same trade relationship that existed before he started the fight. He continued the damage from this trade war in his second term, having destroyed the farmers’ soybean market in his first.
He launched a trade war without first asking what leverage China had. The answer turned out to be: quite a lot.
Infrastructure
A promise so vague and unfulfilled that “Infrastructure Week” became a national joke.
In each case, Trump loved the announcement — the moment that felt like a win — but avoided the long months or years required to turn a promise into reality.
What About the Abraham Accords?
This is the obvious objection. The Abraham Accords were real: signed agreements, new embassies, billions in trade between Israel and Arab states. A White House ceremony with actual substance behind it. His supporters call it historic. Even critics acknowledge it was an achievement.
So doesn’t this prove he can finish things?
Not quite. Look closer.
The Abraham Accords were textbook low-hanging fruit. Normalizing relations between Israel and Gulf states that already wanted ties for their own reasons — mainly fear of Iran — was the easy part. These weren’t enemies being brought together through painstaking negotiation. They were pragmatic partners who saw mutual advantage.
The hard part — addressing Palestinian grievances, the actual core of Middle East instability — Trump simply skipped.
His team explicitly framed it as “peace without the Palestinians,” betting that Arab states cared more about countering Iran than about Arab solidarity. The strategy worked brilliantly for the photo op and the trade deals.
It failed catastrophically for actual peace.
Just over three years later, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Seized documents and interrogations revealed that Hamas saw the Accords as an existential threat — Arab patrons abandoning them, normalization accelerating with Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian cause becoming irrelevant. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar explicitly told associates that an “extraordinary act” was needed to derail Saudi normalization. Even Biden acknowledged Hamas timed the attack to disrupt the growing momentum.
U.S. intelligence had warned about exactly this risk. In 2020, under Trump’s own administration, DHS flagged that Accords-driven normalization could “inflame” terrorism by alienating Palestinians. The warning was ignored.
Trump got his signing ceremony and his headlines about a “new Middle East.”
The region got another war — one partly fueled by the very shortcuts his deal represented.
This is the pattern in its purest form: Do the easy thing. Skip the hard thing. Declare victory. Walk away before the consequences arrive.
What About the USFL?
This is another objection. Trump bought the New Jersey Generals and stayed with the league until the bitter end. He didn’t walk away. He didn’t abandon ship. Doesn’t that prove he can finish something?
In 1983, the USFL launched with a smart strategy: play spring football when fans were hungry for the sport, don’t compete with the NFL, build slowly. The first season succeeded — attendance and ratings met or exceeded projections. Then Trump bought the New Jersey Generals and immediately pushed to move the league to fall to compete head-to-head with the NFL. His real goal wasn’t building a successful league — it was forcing a merger so he could finally become an NFL owner, something he’d tried and failed to do for years. Other owners, including John Bassett, warned the move would be catastrophic. Consulting firms said stay with spring. Trump didn’t care: “If God wanted football in the spring, he wouldn’t have created baseball.”
He convinced the owners to switch to fall and sue the NFL for antitrust violations. The USFL technically won the lawsuit. The jury awarded them $1 — tripled to $3 for antitrust. By 1986, the league was dead. Teams folded, players scattered, investors lost millions. Trump walked away claiming he “got this league to go as far as it could go” and that it boosted his image. Houston Gamblers owner Jerry Argovitz saw it differently: “Donald didn’t love the USFL. To him, it was small potatoes. Which is terrible, because we had a great league and a great idea. But then everyone let Donald Trump take over. It was our death.”
Yes, Trump stayed until the end. But he finished the league by destroying it. He completed his goal — trying to force his way into the NFL — not the league’s goal of being a successful football enterprise. This is finishing in the worst possible way: taking something that worked and driving it into the ground while pursuing your own separate agenda.
The Final Point
The presidency is not a reality show or a branding opportunity. It is not about creating the illusion of accomplishment. It is about doing the hard, unglamorous work that almost no one will applaud.
Donald Trump has shown, over and over again, that he is not interested in that work. He never has been.
A man who never finishes anything cannot be trusted with the world’s hardest problems.
And today, those problems are far too urgent — and far too dangerous — to be left once again to someone who only loves the opening act.