Trump had a lot of bad advisers in the beginning.
He was a bit naive, to tell the truth.
He didn’t realize what kind of toxic slime he was dealing with, in the Swamp.
It is really the one thing I have found disappointing with Trump. I am surprised he hasn’t been better at putting the right people in the right positions. I would have thought all his years of expertise as a business leader would have helped him there.
I guess the mechanisms of the political machines in DC don’t correlated well to the survival of the fittest in the free market. Operating in the swamp is a different skill set.
Years of dealing with Mafia/gangster slime in the construction industry, especially NY, left him naive regarding the far more subtle slime possible in loftier circles and the establishment, yet probably leaving him believing he understood the nature of slime. A friend, a New York architect, was involved in an upstate historic restoration project financed by some of these criminal types. Probably for money laundering. Some times he had to do work-arounds on details regarding historic preservation laws. He knew how to do them and they were no big deal, yet these guys often insisted in doing something highly questionable to solve the problem when the standard way would have been quicker and easier, and also legal. He finally came to the conclusion that these guys were constitutionally unable to do things the easy legal way. Psychologically they just HAD TO game the system.