I Was Right About Trump

The Trump administration is being run by morons

Before the second Trump administration began, there were a decent number of smart Trump supporters. Many of these people, however, have already thrown Trump under the bus—just a few months after the Trump administration began. Richard Hanania, whom I debated before the election about whether to vote for Trump, recently admitted that he was wrong to vote for Trump:

Samuel Hammond, who wrote the effective altruist case for Trump 2024, has also been mugged by reality. Hammond recently jokingly quipped that the only remaining EA argument for Trump is that by crushing the U.S. economy, Trump might allow China to surpass us so thoroughly that there isn’t a deadly AI arms race.

This would be a bit like if a person recommended you eat at a restaurant, but after arriving found the food to be so bad that they declare, “the last remaining argument for this restaurant is that the food might be poisoned, and it might be that you suck!”

Before the election, I made a series of predictions about the bad things Trump would do. My predictions were quite good. Specifically, in my most concise statement of the case against Trump, I predicted Trump would:

• Threaten Democracy and breach norms. He obviously has done this in numerous ways with, for instance, his recent policy of chucking people into ICE facilities for writing pieces in their student newspaper that are mildly critical of Israel. He’s also carried out a series of executive orders that drastically expand executive power, thoroughly usurped congress’s power of the purse, violated a supreme court ruling, and seriously discussed serving another term.

• Go after his political enemies. While Trump has yet to go after his enemies in a major way, he’s continued discussing attacking people he perceives as disloyal. More concerningly, he’s discussed attempting to impeach judges who strike down his rulings. Of course, if the courts cannot overrule the actions of the president, then the executive only follows congress if it wants to—there is no longer any serious check on the executive. He’s also stopped holding press conferences with news organizations he doesn’t like and attacked his opponents in various other ways.

• Put morons like RFK Jr. into important agencies. He has, of course, done this. In RFK Jr.’s role as head of health and human services, he’s thoroughly decimated HHS, causing a measles outbreak and undermining HHS’s ability to combat diseases.

• Make factory farming worse. While Trump hasn’t yet taken major action to expand factory farming, he appointed Brooke Rollins who expressed support for what is by far the most dangerous bill for animal welfare currently being considered. The person Trump appointed to run agricultural policy is a shill for factory farms. It’s quite alarming that the person who Trump appointed to regulate the biggest torture industry on earth’s primary concern is that some activists are trying to stop their torturing.

• Increase existential risks. Trump has yet to cause the extinction of life on Earth, which is good I guess??? However, he’s clearly inflamed tensions by trying to take over Canada and Greenland!! Trump’s global tariffs have undermined the system of global cooperation needed to protect against future technology. He’s repeatedly antagonized Europe and Canada and has ended U.S. participation in the world health organization—a decision that will massively increase existential risks. We no longer have the capacity for an effective global response to pandemics and bioterrorism.

• Carry out draconian mass deportations. This is exactly what he’s done.

• Impose major tariffs which would devastate the economy. Once again, this is what he’s done. Trump’s tariffs are greater than the Smoot–Hawley tariffs and are the greatest example of self-inflicted economic disaster in recent memory. My only error was underestimating Trump’s tariffs. Now, while he has now paused these tariffs, there still are 10% across the board tariffs and the threat of the massive tariffs coming back after 90 days.

• Cut PEPFAR, the primary program combatting AIDS overseas. PEPFAR has saved millions of lives. Now, millions more people will die because the Trump administration is too stupid to figure out that PEPFAR is part of humanitarian aid. I predicted PEPFAR cuts long before it was on the public radar.

• Hurt the economy. He has obviously done that! The stock market is way down.

Overall, I think my track record has been quite good. This is very bad news for the world given that I predicted that Trump would do terrible things. If anything, he’s been even worse than I expected. He’s done more horrible things more quickly. The people around him have been even more willing to go along with his ridiculous schemes. The Republican party has become supportive of conquering Canada and Greenland—the fact that this is seriously entertained is all the proof one needs that it has become a cult of personality. There is no longer ideology, just worship of Trump.

For most of history, we’ve had broadly competent people running things. While you might disagree politically with the sorts of officials Biden and Obama would appoint to government, they at least were not fucking crazy people. They recognized vaccines work! They didn’t support capriciously killing millions of people to own the libs. When they supported killing people, they at least had some justification for it.

The Trump administration demonstrates what happens when competence vanishes. He puts incompetent morons whose only background is running a Fox News show to head military policy. He puts people who don’t trust vaccines in charge of vaccine policy.

Some people in the Trump administration have functional brains. Vance, for instance, is clearly intelligent. So is Rubio. But the people with brains have to pretend not to have brains. People like Vance and Rubio, so as not to be kicked to the curb, have to use their brainpower to defend invading Greenland. Trump does not value competence, only loyalty. The only people who stuck around are those who kiss his ass on the regular—who would never disobey a direct command from Trump. Pence is out, Vance is in.

The core problem with the Trump white house is, therefore, that everyone is either stupid and evil or pretending to be. They cut government programs violently and with impunity, having little regard for the victims of their actions, especially if they’re not American. They do not listen to the economists, particularly when the economists disagree with Trump. Nor would they listen to other experts.

Policy is being driven by the untutored intuition of a man whose worldview consists primarily of nativist slogans and by the small group of sycophants who have managed to stick by him. Such people are either conniving and cynical or stupid—they either can’t realize the idiocy of the Trumpian program or pretend not to.

To anyone remotely familiar with the president, it is quite obvious that he has no complicated thoughts. It is doubtful whether he has thoughts at all. The truth on various subjects—tariffs, for instance—is often complex. It takes more than two seconds of thought to figure out the right answer. On these complex issues, Trump has no hope of getting the right answer, and has purged everyone who might. We are living in a kakistocracy—rule by the stupid, immoral, and incompetent.

This was the core reason that voting for Trump was a clear mistake. If Harris had been elected, she would have listened to smart people. Certainly she’d have made all sorts of policy mistakes, but there’d at least have been some mechanism by which the true and the good could have percolated up to be government policy. If she for some reason thought that global tariffs would be a good idea, she’d be kept in check by the fact that her advisors would all be smart people who read Matt Yglesias and know how bad tariffs are. Under Trump, there is no such mechanism checking the extremes of a deranged president.

Trump thinks in cliches and acts in whichever ways make him seem most like a tough guy on TV. He has the worldview of Ibram X Kendi—a constant battle of us vs them, even when the them in question is a group of arctic penguins. Other members of his administration are cosplaying being Tony Stark—constantly lying and axing government programs without carefully looking into them because he likes the idea of being a tech entrepreneur transforming government.

Previous administrations would not have calculated tariff numbers using trade deficits. Trade deficits aren’t really deficits of any sort—they’re simply an accounting feature measured by subtracting exports from imports. We are not getting ripped off by Vietnam, even though we have a trade deficit with them. In fact, it is because we are so much richer that they export and we import.

But to Trump and his pea-sized brain, a trade deficit sounds quite scary and fits well with his narrative that American politicians (prior to him, that is) are, without exception, stupid, ineffectual, and unable to make deals, while foreign bureaucrats are clever and conniving—constantly ripping us off. In a previous administration, if one had such a profound misunderstanding of economics, it would be corrected before it became policy. But the Trump administration no longer has anyone who might correct him.

We can analogize the choice of who to vote for as being like which plumber to choose to fix a leak. There might be different plumbers who would employ different strategies to fix a leak. If one strategy is better, perhaps we should have some preference for a plumber who performs that strategy. But far more important than that is having someone who can actually do plumbing—someone who does not decide how to fix a leak based on which way sounds tougher and flatters his delusions that the Chinese are the cause of most leaks. While Harris may have been like the plumber who fixed the leak in the wrong way, Trump is like the plumber who declares that some way of fixing the leak would be weak because of its name, and then hires a subcontractor who causes many leaks of his own, denies that the standard methods for fixing leaks works, and is the single worst fixer of leaks on the planet.

The core problem with Trump, therefore, is that people specifically selected for being apathetic, corrupt, immoral, dishonest, and willing to follow a capricious fool are now running the show. In such an environment, nothing bordering sound policy is to be expected. My judgment before the election was that Trump’s panoply of immeasurable character defects was a much bigger deal than anything about his political ideology compared to that of Harris. Recent history has vindicated this judgment. Having a president with respect for norms and expertise who isn’t out of his fucking mind turns out to be important.