Trump and Stupidity

Opinion|The Six Principles of Stupidity

This was the week in which the Chinese made incredible gains in artificial intelligence and the Americans made incredible gains in human stupidity. I’m sorry, but I look at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last week and the only word that accurately describes it is: stupid.

I am not saying the members of the Trump administration are not intelligent. We all know high-I.Q. people who behave in a way that’s as dumb as rocks. I don’t believe that there are stupid people, just stupid behaviors. As the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla once put it, “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”

And I am certainly not saying Donald Trump’s supporters are less intelligent than others. I’ve learned over the years that many upscale Democrats detest intellectual diversity. When they have power over a system — whether it’s academia, the mainstream media, the nonprofits or the Civil Service — they tend to impose a stifling orthodoxy that makes everybody within it duller, more conformist and insular. If Republicans want to upend that, I say: Go for it.

I define stupidity as behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next? If somebody comes up to you and says, “I think I’m going to take a hike in a lightning storm with a copper antenna on my head,” stupidity replies, “That sounds like a really great idea!” Stupidity is the tendency to take actions that hurt you and the people around you.

The administration produced volleys of stupidity this week. It renewed threats to impose ruinous tariffs on Canada and Mexico that would drive up inflation in America. It attempted a broad and general purge of the federal work force, apparently without asking how that purge would affect government operations. But I’d like to focus on one other episode: the attempt to freeze federal spending on assistance programs, and Trump’s subsequent decision to reverse course and undo the freeze.

When announcing the freeze, the administration stated its clear goal — to defund things like the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that Trump disapproves of. A prudent administration would have picked the programs it opposed and focused on cutting those, through a well-established process known as rescission authority. But the Trump administration decided to impose a vague, half-baked freeze on what it claimed amounted to more than $3 trillion in federal spending. Suddenly, patients in cancer trials at the National Institutes of Health didn’t know if they could continue their treatments, Head Start administrators didn’t know if they could draw federal funds, cities and states across America didn’t know if they would have money for police forces, schools, nutrition programs, highway repair and other basic services.