Spelunking the crevices of incompetence

What if Trump's mistakes aren't mistakes?

In 2020, I created a stir by saying that Trump would be less dangerous to our republic if he had won then, versus winning in 2024, leading to our present situation. At the end of 2023, I revisited that premise. Of course, there was always the alternate path, that Trump would not win in 2024, but it didn’t happen. Things have unfolded rather close to my darkest predictions. I’ve been saying it for years, but most people preferred to believe whatever they wanted.

Now, I’m hearing “I told you so” from folks like Erick Erickson, who for years has called balls and strikes on the Trump administration. The whole issue of defying the courts, removing Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, along with plane loads of Venezuelans who are purportedly members of vicious gangs, has set the judicial system against Trump, for his mockery and rub-your-nose-in-it behavior. The assumption here is that Trump’s play is to get rid of bad actors from other nations in the most efficient way, and that he’s made tactical mistakes which will lead to conflict and work against his plans.

Sure, that explanation works, if you play by the rules of politics and government, where balls and strikes matter. But there’s the possibility that Erick and others in that genre are calling a baseball game when Trump has always been playing Calvinball. I want to examine the possibility—which I happen to believe—that not only are folks like Erick and the Heritage Foundation wrong in their perception of Trump’s goals, the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) crowd who say “the cruelty is the point” are also wrong.

In 2018, The Atlantic published a piece with that title, claiming that “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” I think it’s mostly wrong. Yes, there are some aberrant and malicious narcissists who feed off the suffering of others, but those are a small part of the MAGA movement. I believe the majority of Trump supporters want everyone to prosper in some way, and many identify as Christians, who legitimately pray for people they consider political enemies, as they go about threatening and attacking and trashing those people online and in person. People are funny creatures, able to hold contradictory views in the mind simultaneously, resolving those only when faced with a hard reality that produces cognitive dissonance.

I don’t think MAGA and Trump supporters find community in being cruel, though cruelty is a byproduct of their community. I think the community is found in a shared purpose, but the problem is that their leader does not share their purpose, though he makes it look like he does.

Here’s my thesis on Trump and incompetence.

Donald Trump does not value competence in the normal sense of the word. I use the word “normal” meaning what most reasonable people think of when they hear “competence.” That’s the ability to do the job that matches the title. My friend and co-writer here, David Thornton, is a professional commercial jet pilot. He is competent at flying the aircraft models for which he is rated. The symbol of competence, in his case, is his airman certificate issued by the FAA. The government of Pakistan also issues airman certificates, but more than a third of pilots in Pakistan have faked credentials: they are not competent. A surgeon who is about to operate on my heart had better be competent, but unless I talk to the doctor’s peers and ascertain their opinion, I have no grounds to trust or distrust the surgeon.

In Donald Trump’s world, I am sure he values competence in doctors and pilots—at least where he is the patient or the passenger. But in his role as President of the United States, he does not value competence in that way. Instead, he values the symbols, the visuals, the show. Therefore, the fact that it might have been entirely predictable that Pete Hegseth would be a terrible Secretary of Defense—it was predicted well before Trump’s inauguration—is irrelevant to Trump’s purpose and therefore meaningless in the definition of “competence.” Hegseth’s usefulness is quickly waning, and another will be chosen, competent to do whatever thing haunts the space between Trump’s ears that day.

What I’m saying is that the people who say Trump is shooting himself in the foot, or working against his own purposes, are completely wrong. Trump is working against their purposes, and shooting their desired outcomes in the foot. But incompetence, in the normal sense, is part of Trump’s own game. It’s all a show, and the drama is his fuel.

So when the press goes ape over backbiting at the Pentagon, or confusion in the West Wing, or this-or-that preacher ate Easter dinner with the president, that’s not incompetence. It is actually the point of what Trump is doing. When he wigs and wags on tariffs, only to unwig and unwag the next day, the point is to keep everyone off guard by doing precisely what he impulsively wants. The point is to force the competent people in government—the chief of the IRS, or the Pentagon spokesperson, or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve—to become so crazy that they have to leave.

The point is to make the Supreme Court his enemy, despite his having appointed a third of them, so that he might dominate them. The point is to make the entire judiciary turn against him, despite having appointed a large number of federal judges so that he can defy them openly. The point is that anyone who isn’t on their knees all the time, or useful in some way as a recipient of public humiliation, will be driven to the point of incompetence, because they will be mercilessly gaslit and made to not trust anyone around them.

You might ask, what is the end goal of all that? Is the show a vehicle for some larger goal? Why do it?

I think that the show is partially the goal in itself, and partially the vehicle to make Trump’s desired world his own, to his own eyes, and to anyone who happens that day to see it from a similar observation point. This compulsion goes way, way back, and is the pattern for Trump’s life. Every hotel, property, business, yacht, airplane, airline, sports team, golf course, and infomercial fodder galore accrues to the Trump “brand,” which itself is a show.

So don’t be surprised when Kilmar Abrego Garcia is brought back from CECOT in El Salvador. And don’t be surprised if he doesn’t end up a thorn in the side of people who have made him their cause célèbre. He may very well end up liking Trump. Who knows? That script is not yet written, nor has it been fully conceived in the president’s brain, depending on how it would play.

The person who might best be able to to explain the Trump show is another show-runner, Larry David, co-creator of “Seinfeld.” He managed to persuade the New York Times to publish something so far below the bar of their serious news and opinion standards that it stands almost aloof, unique in its irreverence: “My Dinner With Adolf.” Combining a view of a dashing, funny Herr Hitler with biting satire, this piece captured some of the essence of those who met Trump in person—make no mistake, David’s homage to Hitler is really about Trump.

There are real world examples. The great Peggy Noonan held off meeting Trump for over a decade, because she “had a feeling that up close he would be charming and funny, and that there would be something endearing, and that it would mess with my swing as an observer.” Then she met him, and, in her own words, he was “hilarious.” She confirmed her own decision from years ago: “Honey, your intuition was right. If you'd met him in 2015, you would have loved him and not seen him.”

I love that line: “loved him and not seen him.” It means that when you get past the show that everyone sees, you see the man working the crowd up close, and you realize how very good he is at making himself likable in that way. That is Trump’s definition of competence—that everything he does, and everyone in his orbit, makes him look good to those he wants to “see” him. And those who aren’t the intended audience for that scene, “see” him as he is, meaning they see through the act, or they miss the act entirely.

Trump’s super power, his artifice, is to build forced perspective, in great, totally improvised set pieces that spring from his brain like volunteer plants in a garden.

Here is another example, the one that provoked Larry David’s piece. Late night host Bill Maher got invited to dine with Trump, and he went.

…Maher acknowledged he was getting the backstage version, the good-humored version, someone able to laugh at himself.

He went on to describe seeing clips of Trump on television later that same night, ranting, calling someone “disgusting, you’re a terrible person.” That had Maher wondering: “Who’s that guy? What happened to Glinda the Good Witch?”

This contrast led Maher to believe the real person was the one he saw close up at the White House. “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” he said. “A person who plays a crazy person a lot on TV lives there, which I know is f***** up. It’s just not as f***** up as I thought it was.”

Trump is not crazy. He isn’t even incompetent, because we can’t use the word on him to call balls and strikes, because Trump isn’t even playing the game we are seeing. He’s playing a different game altogether. That means the pundits, when they do the play-by-play on this worked and this didn’t work, are almost universally wrong.

The game Trump is playing is dead serious, and he’s not crazy. But the secret to his delusion is that he’s never back stage. He’s always playing the role, because, like Jupiter or Saturn, there’s no surface, nothing solid on which to land. There is no definition of competence because the only thing that matters is that Trump’s version of reality, at any given moment, is becoming real to him. When reality bites, that’s when Trump becomes unstable (like on January 6th, 2021).

Going back to my original thesis. If Trump had won in 2020, we’d be through with him, because he would not have had sufficient time to craft a new show, a new reality, like the one we’re living now. He was trapped in the White House then, but now he’s not. Donald Trump, in the last four years, took everything the competent world could throw at him and dumped it back on the world. Now we are dealing with his show, his way.

Don’t think the Supreme Court will stop him. Or Congress. Or the stock market. Or foreign leaders. Or the American people. Honestly, I don’t know what will stop him short of something more real than his own personal show coming to rest in his head. If you asked me, I am not sure what it is, beyond something related to mortality, family, or his own self-image.

But beyond that, it’s nothing that a dinner in person wouldn’t cure. If that doesn’t trouble you, then maybe you should fly with some Pakistani pilots, or get your health advice from people who use voodoo dolls and chicken bones as their cure. There’s all kinds of competence, and even more kinds of incompetence.

We have barely begun to plunge the depths of that very deep cave.

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