Fiorina’s effort to revise her reputation began in October 2006, some 20 months after she was ousted as the chief executive of HP, when she published her autobiography. In it, she claimed that she had taken a company that was adrift and gotten it humming again. She described her firing as the action of a dysfunctional board, which it certainly was. But that was in no small part because the directors played Charlie Brown to her Lucy. Again and again, she would say that progress was right around the corner, and they believed her; again and again, she disappointed.

By every metric that mattered, HP was in far worse shape when she was fired than when she was hired. The company’s stock price dropped more than 50 percent during her tenure, compared to a 7 percent drop in the S.&P. 500. And net earnings dropped to $2.4 billion from $3.1 billion during that same time. The Compaq merger, meanwhile, was a misguided fiasco; today, virtually all remnants of it have disappeared from HP. Fiorina’s me-me-me leadership style demoralized the company and its shareholders. When she walked out the door in February 2005 — with a $21 million severance package — the stock jumped nearly 7 percent.

Trump? He’s a business legend, all right, — in his own mind. To listen to him, you’d think he is the greatest business person of all time. He is not even close. What he mainly is, as his presidential campaign is proving, is our era’s P.T. Barnum.

The key fact about Trump’s early success is that it would never have happened without his father Fred’s money. As Tim O’Brien points out in his highly entertaining 2005 biography, “TrumpNation,” Trump would have flopped in his first foray in the big time — turning the Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt in Midtown Manhattan — if his father had not lent him the money to cover cost overruns.