I once was working on a project at a very large company back in Seattle. Someone with considerably less experience than I had, (decades less,) came to my cubical and somewhat derisively suggested that I change the the way I was working on the project. She said I should try it another way that she had heard about.

In my experience, her way had never worked in any other place I’d ever seen it implemented, so I very calmly asked her if she had ever done it that way. She said no. I suggested that she go back to her desk and work on the project she was working on, in the way that she had suggested, and when she was done and the project was successful, she could come back and show me how to fix my project using her tried and proven methodologies. It wasn’t that I was not willing to listen to her, but I felt that I had more experience than she did, and she was trying to implement a pattern that had never been proven and that she had never used.

She never returned.

What if Trump’s recent comments are simply following good busines process? I think he’s say the same thing to some young apartment manager who came up to him and tried to tell him how to run one of Trump Plaza. That is what Trump said to four young Representatives. It wasn’t a racist comment. It was a business comment.

“Show us the proof, show us how to do it, and then we’ll listen. Oh, you don’t have any real-world experience? Go back to your workspace, go back to a place where you can implement those policies, where you have a blank canvas, and see if your suggestions and ideas work.

But don’t come into our work space, into a place that is following a pattern that has been relatively successful for more than 200 years, following rules which we believe are inspired, and tell us how much you hate our process, and our rules, and our results, and then tell us to try something that you’ve never even tried, and that you have no proof of it working anywhere else.”