Sorry, Trump: Losing almost $1 billion isn’t the experience voters want

Republican nominee Donald Trump has as a much chance of convincing voters that that he’s a “genius” — as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) called him — as gamblers had winning a bet at one of his many failed casinos.

{mosads}I don’t care what Giuliani thinks — a guy who loses almost $1 billion in one year is not an “economic genius.” Trump can tell voters that his business losses make him brilliant, but voters won’t buy the credentials of a presidential candidate who has gone Chapter 11 several times during his business career.

The GOP nominee managed to lose a fortune even though he cut corners and broke laws. He stiffed his workers and contractors. Mr. Make America Great Again broke the law that prohibited U.S. businesses from doing business with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. He also broke the hearts of steelworkers in the Rust Belt when he bought cheap metal from China.

Trump’s business failures are a big problem. The biggest advantage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has over the GOP standard-bearer is that voters are more likely to think she has the qualifications and experience to be an effective president. In a new survey taken by CBS News, a big majority (63 percent) of voters thought Clinton had the right stuff to be president. Only one in three voters (36 percent) said the same thing about the failed businessman. Even voters who don’t like or trust the Clinton think she has the qualifications to be an effective chief executive.

Experience isn’t the only thing that matters in a presidential race, but you have to have some kind of qualification to get your foot in the door to the White House. When baseball scouts look at young right-handed pitchers, they look at speed, location and the ability to know a good breaking pitch. But when a right-handed pitching prospect doesn’t crack 90 mph on the radar gun, nothing else matters.

It’s the same thing in presidential politics: Voters may like Trump because he savages the political system and says out loud what many Americans think. But he won’t be president because Americans don’t think he has what it takes to be a good chief executive and commander in chief.

Clinton has already demonstrated she has the qualifications to be president. Trump hasn’t crossed that threshold with voters yet and he has little time left to do it. Americans will vote for the candidate who is best qualified to run the country. Right, now that is Clinton, warts and all. Trump was so defensive and so off-message during the first debate,  and has been throughout the campaign, that he never has been able to pitch his effectiveness — much less make the sale.

Trump can bully the Kahn family and Alicia Machado to his heart’s content, but those personal attacks don’t do anything to convince voters that he’s up to being an effective president; they only raise questions about whether he has the temperament to do the job. Trump’s business experience is the only credential he has to establish his qualification to be the nation’s chief executive. And voters are more than willing to believe that a guy who ran his company into the ground will do the same to the United States of America.

The only way he can establish his bona fides is to argue that he is an economic powerhouse. Trump’s bankruptcies and business failures undermine his best hope of establishing his qualifications. If he has any chance to sell himself as a candidate qualified to run the nation, he needs to stay disciplined and on message, which he is pathologically incapable of doing.

If a vote for president was just a protest vote, Donald Trump would be standing in high cotton. But even many angry voters won’t be casting a protest vote for the GOP nominee, because they’d rather have an effective president. And right, the candidate who best matches that is Hillary Clinton. In a race to select the next commander in chief, experience still counts — even with disillusioned voters.

Bannon is CEO of Bannon Communications Research, which works with progressive groups, labor unions and Democratic candidates. He contributes regularly to two nationally syndicated progressive talk radio shows, “The Leslie Marshall Show” and “The Jeff Santos Show.” Bannon is also political analyst for CLTV, the cable news station of the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV and a senior adviser to and contributing editor for MyTiller.com, the social media network for politics.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.