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GELFAND’S WORLD - Most of us recognize that there is something wrong with the president, in that he subscribes to several belief systems that are not only incorrect, they are downright dangerous. The tariff policies threaten to tank the economy, the failure to accept global warming sends us down a road to physical destruction, and the angry, vengeful attitude towards Democrats leads to a fractured, non-unified country. Donald Trump is sort of the anti-Washington or anti-Lincoln in American history.
So what do we do about it? My prescription is going to depend on a couple of extra inferences.
Let’s start with the phenomenon that has come to be called the Dunning – Kruger effect. In brief, a couple of psychological researchers wondered how the lowest scoring students thought of themselves. It turns out that when asked, the students who scored in the lowest group predicted that they would score in the top half of the class. This finding has been misunderstood to mean that stupid people cannot understand that they are stupid. It’s not quite that way.
One research group took the idea a bit further. You can read what Eric Gaze said about that work here. The finding? Even lower scoring people have a pretty good idea of their own performance – when asked to say whether they know they got a question right or have no idea what the answer was, they will give a truthful and correct self-evaluation most of the time. The complication, as Dunning and Kruger showed, is that we all think that we are above average, so these same people would predict that they would, indeed, finish in the top half of the class. If you find this curious, think about it like this: These students understood that they were getting 15 questions correct out of the 50 that were asked. They just didn’t understand that the upper half of the class were getting 25 questions right. What seems like a contradiction is, according to Gaze, just a complication of the way you ask the question.
So now another question arises, one which has serious consequences: What is the diagnosis when it comes to Donald Trump? I mean, here is a guy who is dead wrong on climate, the economy, most kinds of negotiation, and the collection of facts in general. He speaks with complete sincerity about how American cities are being burned to the ground by violent mobs, just as he claimed that Ohio immigrants were hunting and eating cats and dogs. And, he rejects easily verifiable statements as “fake news.”
Well, no matter how you parse out Dunning-Kruger and the later work by Gaze, you come to this conclusion: Donald Trump is that rare specimen who lacks self-awareness about his own inability.
Let me try to explain that. If you asked me about the detailed analysis of some military campaign, I would plead ignorance. I don’t pretend to be an expert on armed conflict. Similarly, I don’t pretend to be an expert on string theory or organic synthesis. There are lots of people more expert than me in all of these fields. Yet Donald Trump seems to believe that he knows more than his generals (as he refers to them) and felt enabled to suggest pharmaceutical remedies for Covid-19 to the top people in the field, and right on live television to boot. In every case we are aware of, he seems to think that he, alone, has the insight and knowledge, whereas his record in real-world issues is sadly lacking.
Whether this guy has old fashioned delusions of grandeur or something slightly different, it is clear that there is something deeply wrong with his sense of self-awareness.
Clint Eastwood had a great movie line: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Donald Trump is not that man.
It’s daunting and bothersome to have to make this realization this late in our history and in the Trump career. Think about this fact: Every modern economist understands the history of tariff reductions as a road to economic growth. It’s even a conservative icon – they like to refer to it as “free markets.” Suddenly, we have a president who believes in something nearly exactly the opposite.
I won’t belabor the issue of climate change here. You’ve heard it before. But how could a national leader with access to the best minds be so wrong?
Put it all together and we are forced to the conclusion that Donald Trump is simply incapable of understanding his own limitations. He must live in a world which is determined by emotional needs much more than by logic or fact-finding.
And now the country is faced with another government shutdown. We’ve been experiencing them fairly routinely, ever since Newt Gingrich invented the modern procedure. The problem, this time around, is that the conflict goes beyond the merely political and partisan. This time around, the problem involves Trump’s personal limitations. Since he cannot understand the illogic that underlies his actions on trade, taxes, health care, or even foreign affairs, there is little that the opposition party can do in terms of negotiations.
So what do you do as the opposition party when the president makes it crystal clear that he hates all Democrats and will send his armies into your cities just to make trouble? Or, to put it in more concrete terms, how do you deal with a person who believes that your cities are burning to the ground, and only he can save you?
Here is where the Democrats in the Senate are going wrong and, strangely enough, the Republicans seem to be doing things a little bit right.
What are the Democrats doing that is wrong? Answer: They are bothering to negotiate with the Trump administration while the ICE raids are continuing, while the tariffs are strangling Pacific rim trade, and while Trump continues to spout hate and venom. Instead of negotiating another Munich Pact (this time over medical funding), the Democrats should just keep their mouths shut, refuse to negotiate the surrender of American cities to federal control, refuse to allow the overthrow of independent American universities, and refuse to honor Trump’s hate-filled speeches.
And here is where the Republican response is interesting. The Republicans have it in their power to end the government shutdown in an afternoon. All they have to do is abolish the use of the filibuster in this particular realm. They have the majority of votes, and it’s been done before.
So why aren’t they doing this?
You have to conclude that this is the one thing that Republican leaders have left in holding back Trump’s worst excesses. They realize that the U.S. has not used punitive tariffs as an approach for ages. They know pretty well that climate change is here and getting worse (they’ve been heard to say so). They are generally old enough to remember when Democrats and Republicans drank together and could have personal friendships, even if they brought different interests to the chamber.
So, we have a situation where Republican leaders get up in press conferences to denounce the Democrats for not passing an interim budget bill, but then they fail to even mention that they could get rid of the filibuster if they wanted.
It’s of some interest that the Trump administration isn’t mentioning this possibility. Maybe they actually believe senate Republicans, who may be telling them that such a thing is unthinkable.
Whatever is going on between the Capitol and the White House, the Democrats should just shut up and refuse to deal on things that should not be subject to negotiation. When Trump stops invading American cities, tones down the talk, and recognizes that we are, all of us, Americans, then the talk can begin.
Oh, and one more thing. Just before the deal is finalized, the Democrats can tell Trump’s people that the vote won’t happen until Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been replaced with somebody who is mutually acceptable, and the same goes for Pam Bondi.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
