David Brooks: The Coming Incompetence Crisis, or Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it
Trump’s greatest
achievements are in the field of ignorance. Up until this period I had always
thought of ignorance as a void, as an absence of knowledge. But Trump’s ignorance
is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe
of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own
gravitational pull.
I just read that the
Trump administration has filled only 22 of the 553 key positions that require
Senate confirmation. This makes me worry that the administration will not have
enough manpower to produce the same volume and standard of incompetence that
we’ve come to expect so far. Granted, in its first
few months the administration has produced an impressive amount of ineptitude
with very few people. On his worst days Sean
Spicer can produce more errors than 10 normal men on their best days. Kellyanne
Conway can flail her way through television confrontations 24/7 and still have
the stamina to lose to the Teletubbies on Saturday morning.The White House
staffing system is successfully answering the question, How many scorpions can
you fit in a bottle? And in general, the personnel process has been so rigorous
in its selection of inexperience that those who were hired on the basis of mere
nepotism look like Dean Acheson by comparison.
But still, I worry
that at the current pace the Trump administration is going to run out of
failure. So far, we’ve lived in a golden age of malfunction. Every major Trump
initiative has been blocked or has collapsed, relationships with Congress are
disastrous, the president’s approval ratings are at cataclysmic lows. But can this last? By
midsummer, during the high vacation and indictment season, we could see empty
hallways in the West Wing and a disorienting incompetence shortage emanating
from Washington. The executive branch
could simply go dark. CNN’s ratings will plummet. Columnists will wither and
die. Liberals will have to go without the delicious current of schadenfreude
and their daily ritual baths of moral superiority. Now I’m not
underestimating the president’s own capacity for carrying on in an incompetent
manner almost indefinitely. I don’t think we’ve reached peak Trump.
The normal incompetent
person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at
incompetence like our president flails and founders and is too incompetent to
recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and
so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned
to retweet it.
Trump’s greatest
achievements are in the field of ignorance. Up until this period I had always
thought of ignorance as a void, as an absence of knowledge. But Trump’s ignorance
is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe
of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own
gravitational pull. It’s not so much that
he isn’t well informed; it’s that he is prodigiously learned in the sort of
knowledge that doesn’t accord with the facts of our current dimension. It is in its own way a
privilege to be alive at the same time as a man who is the Albert Einstein of
confirmation bias, a man whose most impressive wall is the one between himself
and evidence, a man who doesn’t need to go off in search of enemies because he
is already his own worst one.
But even Trump will
eventually hit the limits of human endurance. I know what it is like to be
profoundly incompetent, and it is exhausting. Just to take a small
example by way of illustration, in the days before GPS I was (and remain)
profoundly incompetent at comprehending driving directions. I would ask for
directions and all would start off normally: “Go down Fourth Street and take a
right on Poplar.” But then all would
slide into a fog of incomprehensibility and I would keep nodding furiously to
try to persuade the person that I could follow what was being said: “Then you
toggle over that spur of the thruway that goes under the overpass before the
six roundabouts of the gargle.” By this time entire
hemispheres of my brain had shut down, and as the person kept talking, my
entire existence slipped into a catatonic mist: “After that it’s just six
wheedles up the perplex and after a quick stop at the bolint it’s the 27th
driveway on the right.” The incompetent person
in the Trump administration has to live in that stupor shroud every day.
So I hope the Trump
team learns to delegate — carelessness in one office, backbiting in another. I
hope the president continues to play golf (I don’t get those progressive
critics who say Trump is ruining the world and then they complain because he
takes time off). I hope his team continues to take advantage of the fact that
it takes only one inexperienced stooge to undo the accomplishments of 100
normal workers. And I hope it
continues to negatively surpass all expectations. I remain a full-fledged
member in the community of the agog.
One of the things I’ve
learned about incompetence over the past few months is that it is radically
nonlinear. Competent people go in one of a few directions. But incompetence is
infinite. The human imagination
is not capacious enough to comprehend all the many ways the Trumpians can find
to screw this thing up.
