Lying and tantrums aside, evidence shows Trump's most important, and dangerous, feature is his ignorance.
By S.V.
Date for HuffPost
Exactly 10 days after taking the presidential oath of office
early this year, Donald
Trump nearly drowned dozens, potentially hundreds, of his own citizens
in California’s Central Valley.
Trump, unilaterally, decided he would solve Los Angeles’
wildfire problem by “opening up” taps to let billions of gallons of water being
stored in two reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada foothills flow into Southern
California.
“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in
California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion
gallons,” he bragged on
social media, along with a photo of water flowing in a stream. “Everybody
should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me
six years ago – There would have been no fire!”
Except not a single drop of those billions of gallons could
possibly have made it to Los Angeles or anywhere even close. They would have,
however, overflowed the banks of rivers leading out of Lake Kaweah and Success
Lake, threatening residents in communities on their shores.
“It was clearly nothing but a poor publicity stunt. And it
was a dangerous one,” California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said at
the time. “An unexpected, non-noticed release threatens lives, threatens the
safety of communities if you flood somewhere without the proper coordination.”
Disaster, quite possibly including drowned residents, was
averted thanks to quick action by local water management officials who talked
the Army Corps of Engineers down from carrying out Trump’s order to open the
floodgates on the two dams to maximum capacity and persuaded them to release a
lesser amount instead.
That, however, did not stop Trump from continuing to boast
about his decision, adding in the hydrologically
impossible claim that the water in question had originated in Canada.
“The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, and ― but
the Pacific Northwest and it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a
day. And I opened it up,” he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6.
“Thank you very much, Canada, we appreciate it,” he said at
an Oval Office photo opportunity two months later. “They had all that water
pouring out right into the Pacific. They had a big valve, like a giant valve as
big as this room and they turned the valve. Takes one day to turn it.”
University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning,
one of the co-discoverers of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” that describes how
some people with little competence in any specific field nevertheless
overestimate their level of expertise, said he was hard-pressed to explain
Trump’s belief that water from Canada somehow flows to California, except for
their relative placement on a standard map of North America.
“People take things they know and misapply them,” Dunning
said. “In his case, north is up and south is down, and I’m guessing here,
because water flows down, if he opens up the tap, water will flow down from
Canada to irrigate the crops in California.”
White House aides did not respond to queries about Trump’s
decision that wasted billions of gallons of water or, for that matter, any
other issues for this story.
Whatever Trump’s actual thought process, the episode offers
just one example of Trump’s failure to understand a problem but a willingness
to nevertheless make a decision based on a conspiracy theory he has heard
about, the uninformed speculation of one of his country club members or even
just a whim grounded in nothing more than supreme confidence in his own “gut
instinct.”
These decisions are distinct from policies his
administration has pursued in his second term that are long-standing
aspirations of the Republican Party and
its dominant wing that Trump seized control of a decade ago. Striking Iranian
nuclear sites, deploying ICE en masse across the country,
cutting Medicaid, extending and deepening tax cuts, defunding the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting — all of these things might have happened under any GOP
president, particularly one who rode to power on anti-establishment, anti-elite
populism.
A host of other Trump decisions, though, do not spring from
well-developed or even hastily dashed-off ideologies. There is no conservative
think tank, for example, churning out white papers proposing to end wildfires
by dumping water into the ground 200 miles away. They result from the nation’s
47th president believing something comically incorrect and clinging to it in
the face of all evidence to the contrary.
They happen because the president is astonishingly ignorant
— in the words of one of his top advisers in the first term, “a moron.”
Some of these beliefs, such as the insistence that sea-level
rise will somehow create more oceanfront property, have little real-world
impact.
Others have had major consequences. Trump’s certainty that other
countries pay tariff revenue to the United States has created a drag on the
U.S. and global economies, spiking prices for consumers and battering domestic
farmers and manufacturers.
That he is willing to go to the mat for patently incorrect
ideas in this second term, of course, should come as little surprise. In his
first term, he embellished a hurricane tracking map with his magic marker,
making it appear that cities in Alabama were in the storm’s path. It led to
alarmed calls and forced the local National Weather Service office to issue a
statement that there was no threat.
Most famously, he once extrapolated from a scientist’s
finding that ordinary disinfectants killed the COVID-19 pathogen on hard
surfaces to suggest that people could inject it into their bodies to eliminate
the virus. Makers of Clorox and other products rushed out statements warning
against ingesting them.
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles
Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and
was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”
‘A fucking moron’
Getting to the root cause of Trump’s ignorance, which
appears to be as broad as it is deep, is complicated by his tireless mendacity.
Does Trump actually believe an obviously false idea is true?
Or is he simply lying — that is, he knows what he is saying is false but is
saying it nevertheless? Those who have worked with him say it’s sometimes hard
to distinguish.
“He can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood,”
said John Bolton, who served as one of Trump’s national security advisers in
his first term and who was recently raided by the FBI following his
repeated criticisms of Trump on television. “A lie is knowing something is not
true and saying it anyway. For Trump, it’s sort of what he wants it to be, and
he kind of makes up things.”
Others have been more blunt about Trump’s relationship with
knowledge and facts.
Annie Leibovitz, the iconic photographer who has done
multiple sessions with Trump, said in
2018: “You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”
Former top aides from his first term in office famously made
their views known to one another to describe their boss. Defense Secretary
James Mattis reportedly said
Trump had the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” while chief of staff
John Kelly once called him an “idiot.”
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to
have called him
a “moron,” which was clarified later
as a “fucking moron.”
Tillerson at the time did not deny having called Trump that
and could not be reached for comment.
However, in a 2018 appearance at
a cancer center benefit, he publicly described details that were actually far
more damning: “A man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t, doesn’t like to
read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t, doesn’t like to get into the
details of a lot of things, but rather, just kind of says, ‘Look, this is what
I believe, and you can try to convince me otherwise.’ But most of the time,
you’re not going to do that.”
Trump’s own statements through the years provide plenty of
evidence for those assessments and, beyond that, suggest a lack of
understanding of physics, geometry and even simple arithmetic.
In the first months upon re-taking office, for instance,
Trump repeatedly told audiences that the war in Ukraine was especially deadly
because of the lack of hills.
“You know, the bullet ― very flat land, as I said, and the
bullet goes, there’s no, there’s no hiding, and a bullet, the only thing going
to stop the bullet is a human body,” he told the World Economic Forum on Jan.
23 via a video feed.
In reality, bullets, like everything else, are affected by
gravity and fall to the ground at an accelerating rate. What’s more, any number
of things can stop a bullet, including cars, walls, trees and so on.
To push his false claim that climate change is a “Chinese
hoax,” Trump says that even if it were true, what would be the harm, as it
would create more valuable land. “You’ll have more oceanfront property,” he said several
times during his 2024 campaign.
His belief defies common sense. While rising sea levels may
temporarily create more shoreline in localized areas with inland valleys, the
total amount of oceanfront land decreases as water height increases.
More recently, Trump has taken to claiming that he will
reduce the price of prescription drugs by mathematically impossible amounts.
“We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30 or 40%,
which would be great, not 50 or 60. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%,
600%, 500%, 1,500%,” he said at a July reception for Republican members of
Congress.
For Trump’s claim to be correct, pharmacies would have to
refund many times the value of a prescription each time they filled one. A
medication costing $100, for instance, would have to be handed to the patient
at no charge along with $1,400 in cash.
Info from randos
Among the biggest challenges faced by his aides during his
first term was countering Trump’s predilection for believing outlandish claims,
regardless of their source, even though he had at his fingertips a vast network
of agencies created specifically to obtain and catalogue information.
Instead, Trump solicits the opinions of his old friends in
New York real estate and the members of his various country clubs in Florida
and New Jersey, those close to him say. And when no one in the White House or
his agencies is willing to correct him, the predictable happens.
“He talks to people who are members of the Mar-a-Lago club,
or he talks to people at receptions, and they tell him things, and he takes
them as true, even if his intelligence people are telling him to the contrary,”
Bolton said.
He recalled an instance where Trump falsely insisted, based
on information from one of his friends, that the United States had extensive
land holdings in Japan that could be sold off. “We spent weeks chasing it
down,” Bolton said. “But in Trump’s mind, if he knows something that the
intelligence people don’t know or his advisers don’t know, it just verifies to
him that he’s the only one who really knows everything.”
“If you don’t have people close to him willing to stand up
to him and tell him ‘no,’ then his crazy thoughts become crazy policy,” said
one current top Trump adviser on condition of anonymity.
A different friend, a fellow golfer who plays Trump’s
courses, according to another top Trump adviser, was behind two separate
conspiracy theories that Trump accepted as gospel.
The first claimed that illegal
immigrants had voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in droves in 2016 by
casting a ballot, then going out to their cars to don different shirts and
different hats, then going back in to vote again — and repeating this process
for hours.
Trump actually created a task force to investigate illegal
voting based on this tip in May 2017. It disbanded quietly in early 2018 after
finding nothing.
The golfer friend’s second important tip was that the U.S.
Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was having F-18 fighter
planes falling overboard and sinking because its high-tech electromagnetic
launch system was not providing enough thrust for the planes to get airborne.
Trump’s response to this information — which was completely
false — was to repeatedly order
Pentagon officials to tear apart the already completed carrier and
replace the new system, which was specifically developed to reduce stress on
the planes at takeoff, with decades-old steam catapults.
The military’s strategy for dealing with the nonsensical
order was to ignore it, correctly assuming that Trump would eventually forget
and move on to something else. In the case of the Gerald Ford, it appears to
have worked. The carrier is now in service using the electromagnetic launch
system that Trump, when he is reminded of it, continues to deride.
‘I’m, like, a smart person’
Notwithstanding proof of his profound ignorance, though,
Trump has, through the years, insisted that he possesses a genius-level
intellect.
Among his favorite phrases is “I know more about,” followed
by the subject in question.
“I understand the polls a lot better than many of the
pollsters understood the polls,” he said in early 2017.
“Technology — nobody knows more about technology than me,”
he boasted in
a 2018 Fox News interview.
“I know better than anybody about sanctions, and tariffs and
everything else,” he said in July at a White House photo opportunity.
“’I know more about grass than any human being, I think,
anywhere in the world,” he said two weeks ago.
In March of 2020, in one of his early coronavirus news
conferences he staged in the Rose Garden, Trump was asked why the United States
had a worse testing rate for the virus than South Korea. Trump responded: “I
know South Korea better than anybody.” And then, to prove it, he added: “Do you
know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is?
Thirty-eight million people.”
In fact, Seoul’s 9.6 million population is a mere fraction
of that number. (It does, however, have an elevation of 38 meters — abbreviated
“38 m” on its Wikipedia page).
Just five weeks later, Trump told reporters during a visit
to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that he fully understood the
science behind vaccine research and suggested it might have been because his
uncle had taught at MIT.
“I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said. “People are
surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you
know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”
And as much as Trump has bragged about his own intellect
through the years, he has simultaneously denigrated that of others.
He has repeatedly called all his predecessors in the job
“stupid” for having forged trade agreements that — in Trump’s inaccurate view —
allowed other nations to “cheat” the United States. He calls critics “dumb” and
“not smart” and, frequently, “low IQ.”
“He’s an average mentally person, I’d say low in terms of
what he does. Low, low IQ for what he does,” Trump said of Federal Reserve
Chairman Jerome Powell, who is widely credited with guiding the U.S. economy
out of the pandemic without bringing on a recession. “I think he’s a very
stupid person, actually.”
Marc Short, who worked in Trump’s White House as Vice
President Mike
Pence’s chief of staff, said Trump’s certainty about his own views was the
norm. “He just generally believes that we are all wrong and he is right,” Short
said.
According to Dunning, that particular trait of believing you
know more than experts in pretty much every field goes far beyond the typical
case of Dunning-Kruger.
“That’s an added layer,” Dunning said. “That’s
self-deception.”
Trump does occasionally show flashes of intelligence. On the
matter of daylight saving time, Trump earlier this year succinctly explained the
pros and cons of keeping it year-round and concluded it was best left alone. On
a more visceral level, he is adept at lashing out when put on the defensive,
often with a low-brow insult that delights his devoted followers.
George Conway, who first met Trump during a Manhattan condo
board dispute two decades ago, supported him during his 2016 campaign, but
quickly became a vocal critic after Trump took office, said Trump clearly
possesses at least one form of intelligence: the ability to sense weakness in
others.
“It’s a psychopath’s emotional intelligence,” Conway said.
“He can smell fear, and he can smell whether people are complying. He’s not
intelligent in the sense that he absorbs information.”
A danger to the country
Ordinarily when the Army Corps of Engineers is planning to
release water from its reservoirs, it coordinates with state and local
officials days and weeks ahead of time to ensure it is done safely and
productively.
During the winter months, when water is typically not
released because it is not needed by farmers downstream, local maintenance
crews use the opportunity to clear the channel of debris and perform other
maintenance. Homeless people often set up camps near the waterways, which also
draw anglers and other recreational users.
On Jan. 30, this extensive coordination never happened. To
honor Trump’s order, Army Corps officials notified local authorities at around
noon that it would be fully opening the floodgates that same evening.
“There was very, very little notice,” said Peter Gleick, a
hydrology expert at the Pacific Institute in Oakland.
It was only because state and local water managers were able
to persuade the Army Corps not to release the maximum flow of water that the
channels did not flood. In the end, water flowed out of the reservoirs at 2,500
cubic feet per second, rather than the 5,000 the Army Corps had originally
planned. They ended the dump after three days, with 2.5 billion gallons
released, well short of the 5.2 billion Trump had bragged about.
Every bit of that was wasted after having flowed into a lake
bed with no outlet. Much evaporated, while some percolated down into the ground
— long before the summer months when farmers would actually need it.
Trump, apparently unaware that the Army Corps did not carry
out his instructions as he had ordered — and thereby potentially saving lives
and billions in property damage — continues to brag about his decision to this
day.
“We actually sent in our military to have the water come
down into L.A.,” he said, falsely, at the Aug. 11 news conference he staged to
announce his takeover of Washington’s police department.
The idea that rain falling in Canada manages to flow to
Southern California, despite multiple mountain ranges separating them, remains
lodged in Trump’s mind.
“There’s absolutely no way, short of putting it in tanker
trucks, to get that water to Los Angeles,” Gleick said. “There is zero Canadian
water coming to California. There is no way. That water transfer is happening
in Donald Trump’s head.”
Because of the refusal of the Army Corps staff to carry out
Trump’s demand — which may technically have been insubordination under military
rules — the water release episode appears to have passed without permanent
harm.
Nevertheless, Trump’s decision-making is highly impulsive,
based on his “gut instincts” rather than actual research, so it is impossible
to predict whether or when his ignorance might next endanger people’s lives as
it did in California’s Central Valley.
His inability or unwillingness to discern and use accurate
information, however, is already hurting Americans in the one area where many
of them believed he would help: his stewardship of the economy. Trump picked up
his trade war where he had left off at the end of his first term, only this
time, instead of focusing on China, he has broadened it to the entire world
based on his failure to understand how tariffs work.
Trump, again calling his predecessors in the Oval Office
“stupid” for not sharing in his confusion about international trade, started
imposing high import taxes — paid
entirely by Americans — immediately upon taking office. While those
new levies were delayed several
times, they are now finally taking hold, with consumer
prices expected to increase even more in the coming months and job
creation expected to slow.
Trump, falsely, continues to claim that the tariffs are
somehow paid by exporters, even though his own economic advisers have tried to
set him straight.
“It’s been explained many times, but he continues to repeat
it,” Short said.
The willingness of at least some advisers to tell Trump he
was wrong is likely the starkest contrast between his first four years and now,
when his aides seem more keen to prove their loyalty by telling him what he
wants to hear.
Likely exacerbating that is Trump’s embrace of autocracy and
his eagerness to impose major policies without the approval of Congress or the
states — meaning that Trump may well be even more willing to plow ahead with
his ideas, facts be damned.
“You don’t have to be that smart to be an authoritarian,”
Conway said. “All you need is a complete lack of conscience and restraint, an
insatiable desire for control, worship and revenge, and a simple understanding
of what makes people afraid. Trump’s reptilian intelligence meets that
inglorious standard.”
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Hundreds of millions of trees and
countless animals have gone up in the smoke that has covered our skies, filled
our air, and penetrated our lungs, causing imminent health threats for many and
contributing to long-term damage to the health of millions more. As UMass
Lowell environmental health professor Joel Tickner said of
the air quality that first week of August, “The level of danger is real, and
you want to prevent exposure if you can.”
