FAMILY businesses are different from other sorts—they are held together by strands of DNA as well as the logic of profit. They are rich in scarce resources, such as loyalty and flexibility, but also suffer from extreme challenges, such as family feuds and wayward patriarchs. At their best they are unbeatable. At their worst they are disasters.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is as good an illustration of this point as any. He presents himself as a businessman who can offer America commonsense solutions backed up by professional management—“I’m going to get great people that know what they’re doing, not a bunch of political hacks,” he says. But in fact he is a very particular sort of manager: a second-generation family businessman who inherited a property company from his father, Fred, and relies on his three adult children, Donald, Ivanka and Eric, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to run it.

The debate about the business skills of Mr Trump frequently misses this simple point. Critics lambast his chaotic methods: the Trump Organisation lists 515 businesses and has at various times branched out from property into TV, airlines, beauty pageants and gambling. They forget that family firms are often held together by nothing more than a name and a buccaneering spirit. Some argue that he would be richer if he had invested his inheritance in the stockmarket. But Mr Trump has lived the life of Riley while putting his name on towers in Manhattan, holiday resorts in Palm Beach and golf clubs in Scotland.

For all his braggadocio Mr Trump has avoided some of the most common failings of family businesses such as family rows and botched successions: witness the repeated feuds between the Koch brothers or the battle to see who will succeed Sumner Redstone. The Family Firm Institute says that only 30% of family firms last into the second generation and only 12% into the third. Mr Trump has not only kept his business intact through two divorces and numerous spats. He has also successfully groomed his children (and son-in-law) to take over.

Mr Trump is applying the same family-business formula to his presidential campaign, making all the key decisions himself, but also relying on his three adult children plus Mr Kushner to act as campaign aides, surrogates and all-purpose fixers. Eric and Donald junior have been particular assets with the hunting crowd (who might have been suspicious of Manhattan socialites) thanks to their love of slaughtering African wildlife. Republican Party bigwigs have to go through the children if they want access to Trump senior.

Mr Trump’s family-business style served him brilliantly when he was running for his party’s nomination. Family outfits are good at spotting profit centres that corporate giants ignore. Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder, recognised that Americans wanted “every day low prices” more than they wanted local stores. Mr Trump recognised that working-class conservatives were fed up with a political party that offered steak for the rich in the form of tax cuts but cheap labour and a bit of patriotic sizzle for the masses.

The same style is turning into a disaster now. Successful family businesses know when to consolidate their gains by adopting professional management methods. Mr Trump still thinks he is running in the primaries. Ivanka was potentially a huge asset to the campaign, her skills honed by years of appearances on her father’s television show, “The Apprentice”. But she has expended much of her energy cleaning up after his misogynistic comments rather than extending his brand.

Mr Trump’s campaign now has all the classic signs of a failed family business—riven by faction fights, haunted by reminders of past business dealings with dodgy financiers and property developers, and humiliated by a properly run rival. On August 17th Mr Trump shook up his team for the third time—appointing Stephen Bannon, a conservative journalist, to a new role as campaign chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster, as campaign manager. But he still has not mastered the basic arts of running a campaign, such as buying political advertising and establishing field offices.

Brace yourselves for the next show

Before celebrating Mr Trump’s likely defeat in November it is worth remembering that family businesses can surprise everybody by turning themselves around. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation increased in value after the restructuring that was triggered by a phone-hacking scandal. Mr Trump’s children, who are reportedly the only people capable of reining him in, may yet be able to save his campaign from humiliation. And even if he loses he may be able to parlay political defeat into business success in the form of a conservative television channel fuelled by the rage that he has exploited and starring Ivanka and Co.

And before dismissing the Trumps’ dynastic campaign as a weird aberration it is worth remembering that America is no stranger to political families. The Donald may be the first candidate to run his campaign like a family business but the Adamses, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Bushes and, of course, the Clintons have all regarded politics as a family business. Hillary Clinton is as professional as Mr Trump is slapdash. Yet there are some similarities. Mrs Clinton relies heavily on family members—not just on her husband, Bill, but also on her daughter, Chelsea. (The similarities between Chelsea and Ivanka are uncanny: they are, among other things, both in their mid-30s, and both married to men whose fathers have done time in prison). Mrs Clinton is also prey to conflicts of interest, particularly over the Clinton Foundation, which would be much more fiercely debated now if it weren’t for Mr Trump’s follies. Even if he loses the election America will not be rid of the problems that are created when families, businesses and politics collide.