The one downside of having reached the top is there is nowhere to run from your mistakes.  A wealthy businessman who makes mistakes near the top can always resign and pull out the old trope of needing to spend time with family or other “creative pursuits.  After all, the mistake is the harsh task master of growth and character so why stick around?.  Make a mistake and if you don’t run, that mistake might rebuild you better albeit sometimes painfully .  Our President has been able to outrun a lot of mistakes, but now at last at the top of power, there is nowhere to run and the Mistake, as a builder of character, has absolutely no fear of position or hierarchy.

Our new leader is now trapped at the top in a position with windows for walls in the grade school of character development.  We can hope he can discover what is apparent to most people who at one time or another have been bamboozled or injured by users and manipulators. Most of us aren’t wealthy and can’t run very far from mistakes large or small.  The feedback loop from the global community is indicating many of the people our new leader thought he had a “wonderful connection with” aren’t so wonderful at all.  Even he has had to admit the person he had counted on to help him establish America’s global power and influence was “crazy”; whatever that means to him. Subtract the position and power from the powerful and they probably couldn’t survive the first round of a job interview in the normal world.  The very wealthy have access to jets, secret accounts, staggering mobility and are capable of putting great distance between themselves and their mistakes.  No wonder they are so often developmentally delayed.  The hard truth is at the top of the power pyramid, there is nowhere to hide so your mistakes will either build you into a more complex character or destroy you.

Good here is as simple and straight forward as the 12 step programs of this world.  Own your mistakes and your responsibilities.  People sometimes confuse real class for the arrogance or standoffishness of the powerful, but that is maybe the most serious mistake in the universe.  Class in this posting is not a hierarchy but is a form of developed character where to be wrong is to honestly own and grow from the real world feedback of life. People with real class can be very poor, drive old beaten cars, wear thrift shop finds, have $12 field hand haircuts, and still the world steps back to make room for their class fueled presence.  Maybe the Presidency has something it can teach our President. We may still hang on as a pretty darn good country, but to fully recover in the world we once enjoyed we also need real friends and allies, not more enemies, and most importantly a president who can discern the difference.