Trump is a pathetic human being. But plenty of pathetic human beings have achieved their goals as national leaders. Trump will in all likelihood be terrible at executing policy, not only because he has no rudder aside from wanting adulation but also since he has no idea how the government works. And when you’re this ignorant, you’re going to make unforced error after unforced error.
From the Wall St. Journal:
During their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term. After meeting with Mr. Trump, the only person to be elected president without having held a government or military position, Mr. Obama realized the Republican needs more guidance. He plans to spend more time with his successor than presidents typically do, people familiar with the matter said.
One of the most wrong pro-Trump arguments comes from Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. For a few months during the GOP primary season he intrigued me with his very early call for Trump winning the nomination and some genuinely novel takes on Trump’s persuasive skill. His blog got me to read some great books on persuasion and psychology that helped me think about politics from a new angle and even stick to my concussion rehab better.
But Adams, like Donald Trump, has no idea what it takes to run a country.
In a blogpost entitled ‘Experience is Overrated,’ he argues that because most presidential decisions are toss-ups, all you have to be is smart and pick good advisors to make the right calls.
Individual political decisions are relatively simple, and take this form:
Should we try to kill Bin Laden if we are only 60% sure we can do it, and Pakistan will be pissed-off either way?
Most educated people could make informed decisions about most political questions if they had the benefit of world-class advisors. That’s my claim.
First off, it’s important to recognize that discrete decisions like this are rare. Even the one Adams holds up as a toss-up is much more complicated than he lets on. Obama could’ve bombed the compound or sent in special forces. He could have told the Pakistanis 20 minutes beforehand or not let them know he was coming. Then, if Bin Laden was taken alive, should we try him on US soil? If killed, what should we do with his body? How does he best mollify the Pakistanis? What steps can he take to follow-up this success to help America’s mission in Afghanistan?
The job of the presidency is more akin to directing the world’s most complicated orchestra. You can’t look at the different sections individually — each decision you make about the violins also impacts the winds and percussion. And as conductor, you’re really the only one who has visibility and accountability for how the music sounds together.
Unlike conductors, presidents have to constantly rewrite the score. History has countless examples of a national leader changing history with initiatives their advisors overlooked or vigorously opposed. Just off the top of my head, take Mao sparking the Cultural Revolution, Hitler invading the USSR, Churchill seeing Hitler’s rise in the 1930s and rallying the UK to continue the fight after 1940, and (thesis shoutout) FDR deciding that we needed a United Nations.
Creative political problem-solving is one of the important components when evaluating Value over Replacement President. The concept, stolen from baseball analytics, tries to look at how the president acted different from consensus. For instance, while Thomas Jefferson commonly gets credit for the Louisiana Purchase, every politician who could have been president at the time also agreed it was a good idea, so he shouldn’t win too many points. Hoover shouldn’t take as much of a beating as he does for Smoot-Hawley since most politicians and economists at the time agreed that it was the right move.
Decisions that make it to a President’s desk are the most intractable and important in the world. Thousands of senior administration officials conduct interagency meeting after interagency meeting work to find consensus so they won’t have to kick it upstairs. Faced with bad choices, presidents need to come up with innovative solutions to succeed. [Presidents generally get an hour, maybe two for a doozy, to respond to a crisis or chart out a domestic strategy.]
As Obama put it when reflecting on his decisions on Syria,
The conventional arguments about what could have been done are wrong…But I do ask myself, Was there something that we hadn’t thought of? Was there some move that is beyond what was being presented to me that maybe a Churchill could have seen, or an Eisenhower might have figured out?
So that’s the kind of thing that tends to occupy me when I have the time to think about it — mainly because I think that in this job one of the things you realize is there are problems that just end up being really hard and by definition the only problems that come to my desk are the ones that nobody else can solve…
There are times where I think I wish I could have imagined a different level of insight.
Adams continues:
But how about international trade agreements, tax policy, and healthcare? Those are complicated, right? Yes. Indeed, no president understands those topics in sufficient detail to be trusted with a solo decision. So in those cases, you need advisors. That brings us to the question of how you can find the right advisors.
Easy.
If it’s a military question, you ask the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get you the right advisors for the topic.
If you have a law-and-order question, ask someone like Rudy Giuliani to come up with some suggested advisors. Giuliani could give you ten names from both parties…
The point is that it is easy for a President of the United States to assign people to find the best advisors…The hard part is knowing which advisors are correct. That’s something every CEO deals with every day. Experienced business people know how to solicit competing opinions and size up experts in minutes. It isn’t a rare skill, but obviously some people do it better than others.
Adams tries to wave away the issue of expert selection by saying it’s “easy.” But CEOs consistently say that recruiting is the hardest part of their job.
Advisor selection is a critical way presidents exert personal agency and impact their VORP. Thinking that Giuliani should be your go-to for coming up with ‘ten names from both parties’ on ‘law-and-order’ is the perfect tell. Only the president can select the selectors, and if you don’t know that Gingrich, Christie, Giuliani, Bannon, Conway, and your son-in-law are far from the best of the best, making them gatekeepers will cascade downward. Trump overvalues loyalty, and the mediocrity that drives will cascade down the administration and degrade its performance.
Had Lincoln just, as Adams suggests, “ask the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get you the right advisors for the topic,” the Union would have lost the war. Kennedy and LBJ were surrounded by the ‘Best and the Brightest,’ all of whom save George Ball were encouraging them to escalate in Vietnam.
For Adams’ coup de grace…
I do think any smart, educated, and experienced business person can understand a political issue in under an hour with the right advisors…
Experience is overrated. I say that in part because I live near Silicon Valley and watch inexperienced people changing the world every day. Smart matters. It matters a lot. Experience is often helpful, but it is also deeply overrated.
CEOs get rewarded for bold moves and if they mess up the worst-case scenario sees a few thousand folks out of work. The downside risks in government are so much higher than in business, and experience combined with intelligence decreases the odds of catastrophe. As Arthur Koestler writes in Darkness at Noon,
We [Soviet leaders] all thought one could treat history like experiments in physics. The difference is in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once. Danton and Saint-Just can be sent to the scaffold only once.
Trump has shown he is extremely capable at one thing and one thing only — winning a presidential election. He is a political dilettante who knows about government only through the incomplete sentences flashed on the Fox News ticker. Trump will fail as president for many reasons, chief among them his awesome ignorance. As Newt Gingrich put it back in August, “He can’t learn what he doesn’t know because he doesn’t know he doesn’t know it.”
