“A fatal combination of ignorance and confidence”
Paul Waldman this morning examines our Dunning-Kruger administration. (Hullabaloo readers don’t need the reference explained.) It’s an extension of his commentary on the Derp State, “a government led and staffed by morons who could only advance in an administration as dumb as this one.”
One of the most important things for anyone to know is what you don’t know. There are libraries and databases filled with what Donald Trump doesn’t know. But he doesn’t know that. He’s launched a Dunning-Kruger war in Iran.
Waldman writes:
While the Dunning-Kruger effect can be a product of ignorance itself — those who don’t know what they don’t know might imagine that their understanding is complete — Trump is also likely driven by insecurity about his intelligence. His “tell” is when he brings up his uncle who taught physics at MIT as proof of his brilliant genes, which he tends to do when in the presence of highly credentialed scientists or successful technologists.
When his ignorance is exposed, Trump claims that he couldn’t have known what he didn’t know, because nobody knew it. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he said in amazement in 2017 when he realized how hard it would be to keep his promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare; in fact, everyone knew how complicated it was — everyone except him. Earlier this week he said the same thing about the fact that Iran responded to the war he started by attacking U.S. allies in the Gulf:
Yes, he’s a moron. A moron with a short attention span who thinks he’s a genius. Deep down, Trump knows he is not. But concealing it under bluster and brag (even to himself) is the reflex he’s built up over a lifetime.
Now that he’s started a war with Iran, U.S. military officials supply Trump with a daily update video assembled with his short attention span in mind. As NBC News describes it, “The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of ‘stuff blowing up.’”
Now that the war is dragging as much as Trump’s poll numbers are flagging, more insiders are putting distance between themselves and Trump, Waldman explains.
Especially in an administration so driven by the whims of one man, that man’s ignorance and unearned confidence can have a profound, even catastrophic effect. In the Iran war, we can see Trump’s ignorance operating at multiple levels from the general to the specific, each of which has its own consequences. It would help if he knew more about the history of Iran’s relationship to the United States, which influences the motivations of Iranians and the shape of the regime’s decisions. It would help if he understood the structure of the regime, which has enabled it to survive the kind of decapitation strikes Israel and the U.S. undertook. It would help if he understood internal Iranian politics and the particular nature of the government’s system of repression, which made it highly unlikely that the Iranian people would be willing and able to attempt to overthrow the government.
It would help if Trump considered the good name of the United States of America as an asset as valuable as the Trump brand he slaps on everything kitchy piece of merch in sight and licenses around the world. But no. Elements that do not accrue to his personal financial benefit have no value to him. That lack of concern for anyone but himself is trashing the U.S. brand. Killing off USAID was just a warmup.
His Dunning-Krugerness is wreaking havoc around the world (The Guardian opinion):
To shield ordinary Indians from the war in Iran, the government in Delhi redirected supplies of liquefied gas to Indian families, for which it is the main cooking fuel, limiting supplies to the plastics industry. The Nepalese government rationed gas and the Philippines trimmed the government workweek to four days. Bangladesh closed universities and rationed fuel.
They have been hardest hit by Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz. Economies in Asia import over a third of the energy they consume, on average. Korea imports four-fifths; Japan nine-tenths; Thailand 55%. Most of this comes from the Gulf. About 80% of oil and oil products transiting through the strait in 2025 was destined for Asia, according to the International Energy Agency. But traffic through its waters has collapsed by 90%.
Europe is less reliant on fuel from the Middle East. But it is intensely dependent on imported oil and, critically, natural gas, whose price has surged since US and Israeli bombardments began in Iran. This is reflected in equity markets. By 20 March the MSCI index of European stocks had fallen about 11% since the start of the war, more than the 9% fall of the MSCI Asia index.
Except equity markets don’t need natural gas for heating or cooking.
The King of Chaos, with his infatuation with 19th-century tariffs, his trashing of the postwar, rules-based international order, and the teetotaler’s power-drunk deployment of the U.S. military for bringing any government to its knees that doesn’t kiss his ass, is an epic, world-sized disaster. In New Jersey, it was just his casinos.
Who knows what justification he will make up next, for instance when he remembers he also wants to take over Greenland and the Panama canal. [Author: and Cuba.]
It is foolhardy to believe that this episode of wanton aggression is a freak occurrence, that US belligerence will end after the 2028 election, or maybe earlier if Democrats manage to take over Congress in November. Tens of millions of Americans in the Maga base are motivated by contempt for the rest of the world, which they perceive as treacherous and abusive and, well, “other”.
This political force will not soon go away. Alongside China taking Taiwan and Russia wanting the Baltics, “the US pulls an argument out of a hat to raise random hell” must be added to the world’s risk premium.
How much will the next U.S. administration have to invest in reputation repair for the entire country?