I’ll admit it. I rarely read books on politics. I read my share while reporting on manufacturing policy during that "Death of Common Sense” era of the 1990s, and which included Newt Gingrich’s “Revolution of 1994.” I find them to be too negative for my liking most of the time.

But I do like business books – and the convergence of the two topics in my latest read had me hooked. I took a 128-page treatise to the gym with me on Friday night and I didn’t leave the recumbent bike until I finished it.

The book? Trump: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, written last fall – before the election – by Morry Taylor, the chairman of Titan International, of ag tire and wheel fame. 

Trump book

A select number of conference attendees received Morry Taylor's book, Trump: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly in exchange for questions posted to the businessman/author in Louisville.

Taylor gave me a signed copy last week at the two events we held in downtown Louisville – first the Precision Farming Dealer Summit and then the National No-Tillage Conference. I’d gotten more familiar with Taylor over the last 6 months in part because of research our editors were doing on advanced tire technology. Taylor even credited our No-Till Farmer reporting team for unearthing a case history of a major fuel savings from Western Canada that he nor John Deere may have discovered on their own. Through that chain of events, the chairman of the $1.8 billion corporation suddenly got very interested in our audiences.

I took a shot and invited Taylor to speak at our events in Louisville, and he agreed. We knew from experience that our audience would get “something different” from Taylor, and a change of pace from our traditional content. About 15 years ago, my dad, Frank, helped run an “Ag Day Conference” in New York City for institutional investors. Stock analyst Charlie Rentschler asked our Ag Equipment Intelligence team to assemble a group of farmers, dealers and manufacturers who’d “shoot straight” with money-managers about the real ag market, not just what they hear from the company PR flaks and talking heads. Taylor was among the speakers brought to Wall Street and, as Dad recalls, needed no such direction to speak bluntly.

The GOP Presidential Candidate

We needed to remind this year's attendees that Taylor achieved some earlier fame when he ran as a U.S. presidential candidate in 1996 (Bob Dole and Jack Kemp earned the GOP ticket). Like our current president-elect, Taylor campaigned as an outsider with a business-like discipline to attack the mess in Washington D.C. He put in more than $6 million of his own dollars but bowed out of the race in March of 1996 before throwing his support to Dole, who was beaten by the incumbent, President Bill Clinton.

Traditionally, our conference presenters dive deep into areas like precision ag, autonomy, soil health, cover crop mixes, chemistries, business management, on-farm research trials, yields and profit data, and equipment set-ups. So the presence of Taylor (also known as "The Grizz") would be a different animal.

True to our expectations, Taylor followed no script in Louisville and even divulged plans and programs that we learned weren’t quite ready for public release. But that’s Taylor’s way. You can tune in later to the video presentations to learn about a new aftermarket tire solution and a patent-pending track innovation that leverages a complex cast steel design (you’ll also enjoy the unprecedented volleys with an interested farmer over patent details, which drew chuckles from across the audience).

Morry Taylor

Titan International Chairman Morry Taylor presented twice to dealers and farmers in Louisville in January 2025.

Unlike many top executives' canned speeches at conferences, Taylor invited any question from the floor and rewarded each raised hand with one of his signed books. 

Back to the Book: Trump: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly 

I knew some of Taylor’s story – including his early beginnings in the tool and die business, but also learned we shared some common background. Taylor was a plant engineer at the General Motors (GM) foundry in Saginaw, Mich. I visited the GM plants on several occasions in my reporting on the metalcasting business at Modern Casting, a gig I had in Chicago for 12 years before returning to put family business in Wisconsin and picking up an ag-coverage beat. 

When I read of the changes he was able to make at GM as a greenhorn plant engineer, I was impressed. I can’t think of any better apprenticeship in attacking waste than doing so in front of the crossed-arms union leaders motivated only by self-preservation. I’d learned early on that innovative cost-savings would routinely “be damned” inside the Big Three plants if they posed even minor union-job losses – or even when laborers could be retrained for a better, more value-added and higher-paying position. Nope, nixed before such ideas took flight ...


“I can’t think of any better apprenticeship in attacking waste than doing so in front of the crossed-arms union leaders motivated only by self-preservation.”


That kind of “rear-end protection”  exists inside the Beltway, too, wouldn’t you say?

Taylor’s book illustrates that, in many ways, he was a Trump-like prospect before Trump himself discovered his public-service calling. I can add that Taylor’s a better mannered and more relatable version than our current president-elect and, presumably, one of higher virtue.

We can conclude Taylor was ahead of his time, though Trump had a significant advantage that Taylor didn’t during the Clinton White House era 30 years ago. The U.S. citizenry of recent years has been so fed up that it could begin to consider and embrace radical change – even from the likes of Trump – whose noise and discourse often got in the way and muted his otherwise on-point augmented messages. 

More On Morry...

Farm Equipment excerpted from Morry Taylor’s book, Trump: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, written last fall prior to the election by the chairman of Titan International, of ag tire and wheel fame. The excerpts were split into 3 articles below:

Part I: Where I Come From
Part II: If I Had a Bridge, I’d Sell It to You
Part III: What I Learned from Building an Empire

A Few Nuggets to Note

I don’t have the space (nor the time as I head out on another weeklong trip in the morning) to do a full book review, so I’d encourage you to get your hand on a copy. I got permission from Taylor on Saturday morning to excerpt portions of the book, including a 3-part series of Taylor’s writing – in his own words  which you’ll find here.

His explanation of the pending woes over the national debt is among the clearest I’ve ever read. And his writing incorporates both ideology and facts that can be digested by the average citizen. 

If the book’s title doesn’t grab you, consider the “back of the book description.” It states, “Don’t read this book if you are:

  • A professor from the Ivy League or West Coast; it’ll be bad for your mental health.
  • A member of the deep state in Washington D.C.; you’re going to be out of a job.
  • An actual "enemy of democracy;” Trump’s return will be a triumph of will for the American people.”
Morry Taylor and Mike Lessiter

Titan International Chairman Morry Taylor with Lessiter Media's Mike Lessiter prior to the first of Taylor's two presentations to dealers and farmers in Louisville in January 2025.

So, you can guess what kind of read it’ll be. If Taylor catches even a sniff of a sacred cow, you can bet he is calling for its slaughter. 

Here’s a quick summary of a few notes that warranted my highlighter treatment:

  • As for the need to communicate sweeping change, Taylor points to an anecdote of how he approached 500 shop floor employees with regard to the changes needed to a John Deere contract and got everyone moving forward.
  • He shares how 20% of the $6 trillion outlays of the federal budget does nothing but keep the bureaucracy going.
  • The federal government personnel rolls need dismantling, he says. He calculates the costs of government workers and their ballooning benefits that these regularly-complaining government workers pocket – with no idea of the real-world situation.
  • Taylor says the nation’s military demands (about $800 billion) could be funded nearly in full “just by eliminating federal-government workers who do nothing but cause us woe and waste money.” He also has strong words about federal workers’ unions. I’ll bet most of America doesn’t realize that the government employees are unionized (thanks to President Kennedy), again showing a great chasm of “have vs. have not” pay and benefits for what offers little value in his eyes.
  • Taylor calls for each government agency and department to prove, not protect, its worth. For example, Taylor maintains today’s technology can replace the need for most foreign embassies, and how several agencies should be outright gutted, which would naturally put the decisionmaking back at the state level where it belongs.
  • He’d evict other agencies from their posh D.C. headquarters offices and move them to the flyover states or the borders, where staff can understand real-world issues again vs. causing trouble and wasting dollars inside the Beltway. Think of the IRS existing in Idaho and the NPR and PBS operating out of New Hampshire instead of high-rent D.C., he says. (Side note: I recently discovered how few federal employees have returned to work since Covid, making this idea an easy call.)
  • Government-waste fun facts. There are plenty in the book, such as how the federal motor pool has 300,000 vehicles, managed by 200,000 chauffeurs earning $100,000 a year salaries. He also scrutinizes the private jet expenses of officials at nearly all levels as well as their broadly assigned 24/7 security detail.
  • He’d change laws to  require congressmen to remain in their districts most of the time rather than “living off the fat of the land in Washington and lunching with lobbyists.” In the new Zoom era, representatives can vote remotely from their districts.
  • Speaking of lobbying, Taylor notes that lawyers represent 40% of Congress yet they aren’t required to give up law-firm partnerships as they serve the public, creating all kinds of ethical messes. He praises the words of the late comic/actor Robin Williams: “Politicians ‘should be like NASCAR drivers. They should actually have to have jackets with the names of the people who are sponsoring them … Then you might have a clue as to why they voted that way.”
  • He’d repurpose the Pentagon building and return the military brass to their branch headquarters of West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs. 

“The final chapters are akin to a 'first 100 days' memo from Taylor to Trump. And I hope that someone close to Trump got the book on the coffee tables at Mar-a-Lago.”


Taylor insists that the time has come to return to federalism, to make the needed cuts in D.C. and return power to the states. He writes: “The federal government is not supposed to be the mammoth, overpowering, sprawling, uncontrolled monster that it has become in modern America, the kind of superstate that only led to terrible things in the Soviet Union and is doing a pretty good job of hamstringing Communist China.”

The final chapters of the book are akin to a “first 100 days” memo from Taylor to Trump. And I hope that someone close to Trump got the book on the coffee tables at Mar-a-Lago. If Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, doesn’t work out with her new boss, Trump might consider placing a call to Taylor. He’s thought a lot of it through already.


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