In Washington, people struggling to come to terms with all the details of James Comey’s sacking and the claim that Donald Trump asked him to drop the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn have reached back to Watergatefor comparison. But in many ways the more appropriate perspective is through a business lens: The immediate issue is whether a boss tried to halt embarrassing revelations about his company; the underlying one is whether he knows how to run it.

Of course, running a country is not the same as running a company. A president is both more constrained (by Congress, the press, and voters) and less so (chief executive officers, as a rule, can’t bomb their opponents). And Trump is not the first incoming president to have boasted of his corporate experience; remember George W. Bush, the first MBA president? But Bush had also run Texas. No president has tried to claim the mantle of CEO-in-chief as completely as Trump.

On the campaign trail, he cited his business experience all the time, contrasting his decisiveness, managerial skills, and shrewdness as a negotiator with the amateurish stumbles of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (not to mention several generations of U.S. trade representatives). Many of his first supporters knew him only as the archetypal “You’re fired” boss on The Apprentice. He rushed to bring in figures from the corporate world, luring Rex Tillerson from Exxon Mobil Corp. to run the State Department and a string of Wall Streeters. The stock market initially boomed. Trump’s message to business has been simple: Finally you have an executive in charge of the executive branch. “In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly,” he boasted to the New York Times shortly after his election. “There’s never been a case like this.”

So out of all the ways in which Trump might want to be measured, judging him as a chief executive would seem to be the fairest to him. Forget about ideology, his political agenda, or whether you voted for him; just judge him on whether he has been a competent executive. Would you want to leave him in charge? Or would you be calling an emergency board meeting?

The Comey fracas is the latest in a long list of apparent transgressions for which a normal CEO might lose his job. In the last week, Trump stood accused of having passed on intelligence secrets to the Russians. Any business chief who invited a competitor into the boardroom and then disclosed sensitive information would be in peril. (Klaus Kleinfeld lost his job at Arconic Inc. merely because he wrote an unauthorized stroppy letter to a truculent shareholder.) Appointing inexperienced relatives to important positions is not normally seen as good corporate governance. Jes Staley is currently in trouble at Barclays Plc just for allegedly protecting a friend. The White House was made aware that Flynn had lied to the vice president on Jan. 26, but he didn’t hand in his resignation to Trump until Feb. 13. Any board would want an explanation for that delay. Finally, any CEO who says something that is manifestly untrue in public or on his résumé is in hot water. Those who refuse to correct themselves quickly and satisfactorily often have to go—as happened to the bosses at Yahoo! Inc. and RadioShack.

David Fuller's view

I regard this as a sensible, balanced article and commend it to you.