Almost a year ago I said in this space, "I have a fantasy that Howard Schultz, of Starbucks fame, will challenge Trump." This week the coffee retailing mogul made it all but fact, announcing his retirement as the company's chairman and publicly admitting he is considering a run.
While you're savoring your first cup, imagine a race in which President Donald Trump faced a challenger who ran a business in a way that used to make Americans proud of business.
Imagine him facing a contender who didn't file for bankruptcy multiple times or even once.
Imagine him challenged by a billionaire who owed his success not to cutting deals with local politicians, or to chiseling lenders and suppliers, but to peddling a product people want.
Imagine two tycoons on the podium — one with a web of murky financial connections to overseas oligarchs and domestic cronies, some of them under criminal investigation, whose finances and tax returns remain a state secret; the other a socially conscious former CEO of an entrepreneurial success story, financed by public shareholders that participate in his company's success, and whose financial statements are open and transparent.
Imagine, finally, a contest between fear and trust, which polar opposites Trump's and Schultz's business careers, respectively, represent. Let Trump go on saying the world is full of enemies, enemies and imagined enemies being the oxygen he inhales.
Trump's business credo is that the world is fearful terrain, full of people out to chisel us. The Trumpian business universe is a zero-sum place, as if every business were a casino, in which nobody wins without somebody losing. Naturally he wants to shut out foreigners and foreign products, to slap even our friends with destructive tariffs.
Starbucks is a good example of how capitalism creates a positive sum. When Schultz returned from a trip to Italy, in 1983, with the idea that Italian-style coffee bars could become a meeting place in American life, coffeehouse were relatively rare. After acquiring, in 1987, a then-tiny chain, he built it to 28,000 stores in 77 countries.