Bill Clinton Is a Real Boss, and Donald Trump Isn’t Even Close

I have a hard time watching the news anymore without wanting to throw something at the TV (I don’t own anything expensive enough to risk it, so mostly I just yell at the screen like a crazy person). And lately what gets me yelling isn’t even one specific policy — it’s this weird collective amnesia we seem to have about what a competent president/actual leader looks like. So let’s just say it plainly: Bill Clinton is a real boss. Donald Trump, by comparison, is not, and it’s not close. I know that’s going to make some of you mad. GOOD. Tell me about it.

Let’s start with Clinton, because the man earns it. This is someone who presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history, balanced a federal budget that Republicans still pretend never happened, and somehow managed to do it all while being genuinely funny about the absurdity of the job itself. “Being president is like running a cemetery,” he once joked — you’re supposedly in charge of everyone, and yet nobody’s actually listening to you. That’s a guy who’s self-aware enough to laugh at his own power instead of drowning in it. Toni Morrison — Toni Morrison! — once called him “our first black president” in a 1998 New Yorker piece (a line she later said people misunderstood, but that’s a whole other conversation), because she saw something in how he connected with people who’d been written off that most politicians from Hope, Arkansas had no business understanding. Even the Australian premier who once introduced him on stage called him the “Greatest Communicator in the World.” That’s not spin from a campaign staffer. That’s just what happens when actual charisma meets actual competence. And it didn’t stop the day he left office, either — the guy spent the next two decades running the Clinton Global Initiative, basically guilting billionaires and heads of state into actually funding HIV/AIDS and malaria programs instead of just talking about them at fancy dinners. That’s a real boss move if I’ve ever seen one: leave the job, and keep doing the job anyway because you actually care about the outcome, not just the title.

Now let’s talk about Trump. Where Clinton jokes that “nobody’s listening” to the guy supposedly running everything, Trump stood on a stage in Cleveland in 2016 and told the entire country, essentially, that HE was the only one capable of fixing anything: “I alone can fix it.” Not “we.” Not “my team.” Not “the American people, working together.” Just him. That’s not confidence. That’s a guy who thinks the country is a supporting character in his own movie, and he’s been playing the lead role ever since.

And honestly, that’s the real difference between them, isn’t it? Clinton, for all his considerable flaws (we’ll get there, I promise), seemed to genuinely understand that the job was bigger than he was. Trump has never once given any indication that he believes that, about anything.

I’m clearly not the only one who’s noticed. His own niece, Mary Trump — who happens to actually be a clinical psychologist, not just some internet rando with opinions — wrote an entire book arguing that he’s a textbook narcissist, shaped by a childhood where cruelty got rewarded and empathy got punished. That’s not a stranger’s hot take. That’s someone who watched him grow up.

And she’s far from alone. Twenty-seven different psychiatrists and mental health professionals contributed essays to a book arguing he shows traits of what several of them called “malignant narcissism.” Now — I know, I know — the American Psychiatric Association has an actual rule (the Goldwater Rule) about not diagnosing public figures you’ve never personally examined, and plenty of people pushed back on that book for exactly this reason. Fair enough. I’m not a psychiatrist and neither are you, probably, so take this as informed opinion and not gospel truth. But when that many professionals independently raise their hands and say something here is off, I tend to think it’s worth taking seriously… the same way I’d take it seriously if 27 mechanics all told me my car was about to explode.

Even the people who actually worked for him couldn’t help themselves. James Comey — who Trump fired as FBI director, which tells you something on its own — wrote a memoir comparing him to an actual mob boss, describing his leadership style as “ego driven and about personal loyalty.” Which is almost funny, when you think about it, because “boss” is exactly the word Clinton earns on his own merits, and Trump only gets to borrow it… the mafia kind, not the getting-things-done kind.

Even the people whose entire job is grading presidents on the actual record agree with me here. In C-SPAN’s 2021 survey of presidential historians, Trump landed at 41st out of 44 — dead last in both moral authority AND administrative skills, ahead of basically nobody except Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan (a club you do NOT want to be in). One political scientist involved in the survey put it about as plainly as it can be put, talking about Trump’s habit of firing anyone who brought him bad news: “we all have had bosses like that, right?” Clinton, meanwhile, finished with better-than-average marks. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned.

Now, I did promise I’d get to Clinton’s flaws, and I will, because I try to be fair even when I’m fired up: the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment that followed were a genuine embarrassment, and the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform he signed caused real, lasting harm that a lot of progressives (myself included) are still reckoning with. He’s not a saint. Nobody is.

But there’s a real difference between a leader with documented policy mistakes he’s had to publicly answer for, and a guy whose own blood relatives describe him as a textbook narcissist. One of those is a person you can disagree with. The other is a pattern.

So yeah: Bill Clinton, real boss. Donald Trump, not even close. Fight me about it, I mean that genuinely. Please let me know what you think!