In winning the presidency, Donald J. Trump proposed a grand hypothesis: that the federal government can be managed like a business. “If we could run our country the way I've run my company, we would have a country that you would be so proud of,” he told voters in the final presidential debate. It's a theory that has been suggested, to various degrees, by almost every president in the last century, from Calvin Coolidge to Barack Obama.
What's different this time is the vigorousness of the experiment. With his inauguration on Friday, and a cabinet that is likely to include three billionaires, five former chief executives and some of the business world's most accomplished leaders, Mr. Trump is poised to test, perhaps once and for all, if good governance and crafty deal making are really similar skills.
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