Such absurd details are unnerving rather than merely comical because this is not simply a Twilight Zone case of one fantasist living in a big white house in Washington, D.C. Trump’s proclivity for chaos has not been contained by those around him but has instead infected his entire administration. He asserts that “I’m the only one that matters” when it comes to policy making, and given his disdain for institutional knowledge he frequently ignores the advice of cabinet members and agencies, when he isn’t cutting them out of the loop entirely.
Ironically, the dysfunction that these habits fuel tends to ratify his supporters’ mistrust of Washington (one of the main reasons they voted for Trump in the first place), creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, which, in turn, breeds further cynicism and a reluctance to participate in the political process. A growing number of voters feel there is a gross disconnect between their views and government policies. Commonsense policies like mandatory background checks for gun purchases, supported by more than nine out of ten Americans, have been stymied by Congress, which is filled with members who rely on donations from the NRA. Eighty-seven percent of Americans said in a 2018 poll that they believe Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the States, and yet DACA has remained a political football. And 83 percent of Americans (including 75 percent of Republicans) say they support net neutrality, which was overturned by Trump’s FCC.
THE DECLINING ROLE of rational discourse—and the diminished role of common sense and fact-based policy—hardly started with Donald J. Trump. Rather, he represents the culmination of trends diagnosed in prescient books by Al Gore, Farhad Manjoo, and Susan Jacoby, published nearly a decade before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Among the causes of this decline, Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason) cited an “addiction to infotainment,” the continuing strength of religious fundamentalism, “the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values,” and an education system that “does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.”
As for Gore (The Assault on Reason), he underscored the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy (low voter turnout, an ill-informed electorate, campaigns dominated by money, and media manipulation) and “the persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary.”
At the forefront of Gore’s thinking was the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq and its cynical selling of that war to the public, distorting “America’s political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger” posed by a country that did not attack the United States on 9/11 and lacked the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that administration hawks scared Americans into thinking it possessed.
Indeed, the Iraq war remains a lesson in the calamities that can result when momentous decisions that affect the entire world are not made through a rational policy-making process and the judicious weighing of information and expert analysis, but are instead fueled by ideological certainty and the cherry picking of intelligence to support preconceived idées fixes.
From the start, administration hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pressed for “forward-leaning” intelligence that would help make the case for war. A shadowy operation called the Office of Special Plans was even set up at the Defense Department; its mission, according to a Pentagon adviser quoted by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, was to find evidence of what Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz already believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda and that Iraq possessed a huge arsenal of biological, chemical, and possibly nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, planning for the war on the ground ignored sober warnings from experts, like the army chief of staff, Eric K. Shinseki, who testified that postwar Iraq would require “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.” His recommendation was quickly shot down, as were reports from the Rand Corporation and the Army War College, both of which also warned that postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq would require a large number of troops for an extended period of time. These assessments went unheeded—with fateful consequences—because they did not mesh with the administration’s willfully optimistic promises that the Iraqi people would welcome American troops as liberators and that resistance on the ground would be limited. “A cakewalk,” as one Rumsfeld ally put it.
The failure to send enough troops to secure the country and restore law and order; the sidelining of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project (because of tensions with the Pentagon); the ad hoc decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and to ban all senior members of the Baath Party: such disastrous and avoidable screwups resulted in a bungled American occupation that one soldier, assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority, memorably described as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.” In fact, the Iraq war would prove to be one of the young century’s most catastrophic events, exploding the geopolitics of the region and giving birth to ISIS and a still unspooling set of disasters for the people of Iraq, the region, and the world.
ALTHOUGH TRUMP frequently criticized the decision to invade Iraq during the 2016 campaign, his White House has learned nothing from the Bush administration’s handling of that unnecessary and tragic war. Instead, it has doubled down on reverse-engineered policy making and the repudiation of experts.
For instance, the State Department has been hollowed out as a result of Steve Bannon’s vow to fight for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the White House’s suspicion of “deep state” professionals. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a thirty-six-year-old real-estate developer with no government experience, was handed the Middle East portfolio, while the shrinking State Department was increasingly sidelined. Many important positions stood unfilled at the end of Trump’s first year in office. This was partly because of downsizing and dereliction of duty, partly because of a reluctance to appoint diplomats who expressed reservations about the president’s policies (as in the case of the crucial role of ambassador to South Korea), and partly because of the exodus of foreign service talent from an agency that, under new management, no longer valued their skills at diplomacy, policy knowledge, or experience in far-flung regions of the world. Combined with Trump’s subversion of longtime alliances and trade accords and his steady undermining of democratic ideals, the carelessness with which his administration treated foreign policy led to world confidence in U.S. leadership plummeting in 2017 to a new low of 30 percent (below China and just above Russia), according to a Gallup poll.
In some respects, the Trump White House’s disdain for expertise and experience reflected larger attitudes percolating through American society. In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.
A decade later, the scholar Tom Nichols wrote in The Death of Expertise that a willful hostility toward established knowledge had emerged on both the right and the left, with people aggressively arguing that “every opinion on any matter is as good as every other.” Ignorance now was fashionable.
“If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they