As phony as everything else about him
Robin Lustig sees a dangerous world ahead.
What scares me most about Trump is not only that he is a deeply unpleasant man with deeply unpleasant views but also that he is grotesquely, frighteningly incompetent and woefully unprepared for the task ahead. His reputation as a successful businessman is as phony as everything else about him, and he is a man who has no experience whatsoever of politics even at the very lowest level, who apparently had no idea of what was involved in putting together a new White House team.
More than a week after his election, no one from his team had been in touch with either the State Department or the Pentagon, and when the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe became the first foreign leader to meet him since the election, none of the Japanese leader’s aides could find anyone on the Trump team to brief them ahead of the meeting. (After they met, Mr Abe called the president-elect a man in whom he has ‘great confidence’, which suggests both his well-honed diplomatic skills and his love for whistling in the dark.)
Trump is the man – and this is the team (his daughter and son-in-law were both with him when he met Mr Abe) – who will now have to deal with some of the most skilful and experienced political operators on the planet: put Trump up against Putin, Erdoğan, or Xi Jinping and I’m pretty sure that we won’t have to wait long to see who gets the better of whom.
I think that’s right. Trump has the illusion that he is a brilliant operator, because look how rich he is, but I think he’s mistaken about that.
Trump’s supporters say that we commentators have failed to appreciate that what he said during the election campaign should never have been taken literally. He is, after all, a showman, a man who has likened putting together his administration to picking finalists on his TV show. That’s another reason that he is so dangerous: quite apart from his terrifying character flaws, he can never be believed. ‘Don’t take him literally’ is another way of saying ‘Don’t believe a word he says.’
And we have many reasons independent of the whole “it’s just a political campaign” argument for not believing a word he says. He lies relentlessly and without shame. We’re told he was legitimately elected, but I say he absolutely was not, in large part because of all those lies.
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Donald Trump never really expected to end up where he is. So far, he has shown little sign of having given the mundane nitty-gritty of the presidency much serious thought. Apparently, when he finally got round to chatting to Theresa May on the phone the other day, he told her that if she happened to be in the US any time soon, she should definitely get in touch. He clearly neither knows nor cares how such matters are usually handled. On its own, it doesn’t much matter, but as an example of his ignorance and lack of preparedness, it matters a great deal.
It’s not good to have an ignorant liar in that job.
For the next four years, the world will scarcely dare to breathe as we learn to live with a dangerous and unpredictable president in the White House.
That about sums it up.
This is exactly what you get when the political class is de-professionalized. People say ‘oh, so-and-so is just a career politician’, like that is somehow a bad thing, instead of what it actually means which is this is someone who knows how the system works and how to get results within that system. It’s a stupid thing to criticize anyone over. It irritated me no end to hear people dismiss Hillary Clinton as a ‘career politician’. Personally, I want experienced people doing the jobs they’re good at. Nobody ever says they don’t want a career cardiac surgeon doing their open heart surgery.
But this is part of the delegitimization of expertise, so denigrated in the Brexit campaign and by climate change denialists and smoking causes cancer denialists etc. When people say they want to vote for an outsider, they mean someone not corrupt but what they get is someone who doesn’t know what the Hell they’re doing. This is not only not how you fight corruption, it actually makes the corruption problem worse, as Trump is demonstrating right now. You fight corruption through insisting on transparency and honesty and punishing transgressions against ethical standards. That means having people who understand what those ethical codes mean and how they impact the work they’re trying to do.
“Trump has the illusion that he is a brilliant operator, because look how rich he is, but I think he’s mistaken about that.”
Yep.
Further to Claire’s point about the contempt for expertise, one of the problems Trump will face is that he’s entering a game where he doesn’t even know the rules or the stakes. I don’t doubt that Trump is a somewhat competent negotiator when it comes to construction contracts, or to endorsement deals — though even then, his idea of a good deal is one where he and the other party band together to screw over shareholders/debtholders/contractors/workers/taxpayers and split the benefits. But he’s not even remotely qualified to handle negotiations where everything does not boil down to money.
I think I’m a lot brighter and well-informed than Trump, and in his position, I wouldn’t dream of handling a one-on-one meeting with a Japanese Prime Minister without getting extensive briefing from knowledgeable State Department people. What does Japan want from the U.S., and what does the U.S. want from Japan? What’s Abe’s internal political situation look like — does he need a diplomatic success he can brag about, and is it in our interest to give it to him, or would we prefer to deal with the next government? How do other regional powers like China and South Korea play into this? Which things can be discussed in bilateral meetings, and which should we insist be left for multi-party talks? And so on. And that’s just for a conversation with a fairly reliable ally.
At least George W. Bush (and that’s a phrase we’re using a lot these days, isn’t it?) knew he wasn’t terribly bright, and tried to surround himself with supposedly smart advisers — at least, that was the claim. Trump can’t even be bothered to pretend that it’s important to have smart, qualified people: oh sure, he’ll pay lip service to having “the best” in his administration, but he thinks “the best” means “most loyal to The Donald.”
@Screechy Monkey Absolutely. We’re talking about someone who doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t care to learn. His lack of intellectual curiosity has always been one of the scariest things about him – intellectually incurious people are unbelievably dangerous in positions of power because they don’t think they need anyone’s advice or that they need to sit down and read up on a subject.
I’m not even sure his failure to understand the nitty-gritty mundane work has to do with not thinking he’d win. I think he just assumed it is basically just a shaking hands, making speeches job, and it never occurred to him there was any real work involved in it.
And yes, the denigration of experience is a huge part of the problem. We’re seeing this in other fields, too. It’s why politicians can say, with total seriousness, that we need to get rid of the experienced teachers (why? because students aren’t learning enough…which is never the fault of too few resources and students who have been told they don’t need to know all this stuff to succeed). Then we bring in new graduates straight out of school, who will teach for 3-5 years before they go on to a job in business. Then they’ll be young, energetic, enthusiastic…it doesn’t matter if they lack experience or training, because those are bad things, right? Never mind that all the research suggests that teachers do most of their learning (how to teach) on the job, and don’t really figure out what they’re doing for five years…the don’t listen to the experts people will tell you that is just not right.
Trained politicians? Maybe after Trump, people will figure out why that’s a good thing. Bernie may have been a rebel, but at least he knew politics.
@iknklast In my view Bernie wasn’t much better. Yeah, he’s been in politics a long time but he had some very odd ideas about how things work. When asked how as president he would get his huge, progressive agenda through congress, he answered with a lot of waffle about how the people would rise up. It was total nonsense.
I don’t think he’s a bad man per se, I just think he doesn’t understand how people think and behave. It’s not an uncommon trait on the left, a kind of rosy view of mankind that frankly bears little resemblance to reality.
Bush Jr. and Reagan (or at least I thought at the time) were fools, but had competent (if sometimes evil) advisers whom they let run things. I think Trump suffers from massive Dunning-Kruger and doesn’t realize he should let someone competent do the work. Of course if he does, that person is likely to be Pence, which is a whole other class of nightmare.
Have you changed your mind about Bush and Reagan? I still think they were fools.
Tolerance for Reagan and Bush Jnr being front men has brought us to Trump. Of course, it’s only okay for a rich old white man to be a puppet. I remember when Obama was first touted as Presidential candidate, there was all this talk about how his lack of political experience made him unfit.
Acceptance of Trump is going to undermine all the rules of safe governance. Pence and Conway are on American TV saying “Who cares?” in response to questions about Trump’s conflicts of interest. Unbelievable.
I think he will work out pretty much like this:
Right at first he will be better than expected, because it would be difficult not to be, and there will be a bit of an air of optimism around him.
Then you will get scandals like, for example, Trump using state funds for “security upgrades” to his private residence.
If he wins a second term, which is possible if the Democrats do something stupid like running Kaine in 2020, by about 2022, you will discover that he has been selling cabinet positions to at least one group of oligarchs.
The major issue with Trump isn’t that he is simply corrupt – it is that he’s stupid. That breeds further corruption as it is easier to capture someone who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.
I mean if you’re wild guessing in the first place, there is that much less of a barrier to guessing in the way that improves your house and gives you a fatter bank account.
Basically if you want a look at America’s future, read South African news. You’re going to be getting a lot of the same protests over time, and a lot of the same disillusionment as Trump betrays his base, possibly creating your own version of the EFF.
Whether this will result in America waking up or not, well our previous president was a fool, we replaced him with a bigger one, you sane Americans are going to have one hell of a fight on your hands.