There is a power that dumb things have in this world. It is not the power of imperviousness to criticism, but rather of being so permeable that all criticism passes through with no effect, like the invisible neutrinos that stream through our bodies every second. Grappling with the dawn of the Second Trump Era will require an acceptance of the disquieting truth that Dumb Things and Important Things are about to merge into a single excruciating category of existence.
Donald Trump is an ignorant, overconfident, narcissistic, grievance-ridden man — a dumb man, who over time has attracted around him an asteroid field of dumb allies who are but lesser versions of himself. His invariable instinct to act without knowledge is dumb; his unwavering instinct to make consequential decisions based upon minor personal whim is dumb; his unshakeable belief in his own laughable reasoning is dumb. No sober analysis would grant him any benefit of the doubt. He possesses the poisonous combination of great power and the utter absence of concern for responsibility. He knows little and does much. He lives the child’s fantasy of arranging the immediately visible parts of the world for his own flattery and receiving in return the praise of all the people who wish that they themselves could live such a charmed and feckless existence.
In 2004, a Bush White House official was famously quoted in the New York Times Magazine deriding the “reality-based community.”
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out,” the anonymous official said. “We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This quote was widely mocked at the time. These haughty imperial stereotypes! Surely they will be hoist on the petards of their own grandiosity! The failures of the Iraq War were attributed to this sort of overweening arrogance in the White House.
Two decades later, the arc of the moral universe has bent back towards this attitude. But dumber. The Trump administration will have not only the belief that it can create an alternate reality, but also the pacifying lack of understanding that such a thing might raise eyebrows. Here are history’s new actors: Reality show dregs, cable news hair gel models, pro wrestling moguls, wastrel political heirs driven insane by online conspiracy theories. If you think that the joke is on them, I’m sorry to report that it’s the other way around. They will create the reality that all of us are about to be swamped by. The sooner we understand this, the better.
Part of Trump’s power has always been that his dumb decisions strike his opponents like a series of blows to the head, leaving them woozy and spluttering. The amount of analytical power that non-Republicans have dedicated to trying to process Trump’s actions over the past decade could fuel all the nation’s data centers. We scrutinize each apparently idiotic policy or quote or appointment for signs of hidden strategy, like crazed numerologists trying to pull meaning out of a random number generator. This serves to exhaust the intellectual opposition, while Trump World proceeds merrily on its way. We can do ourselves a tactical favor by coming to terms with the role of one integral factor in what is about to happen to America: Dumbness.
How has the mightiest nation in the world ended up with a Fox News host as its Defense Secretary nominee? A weird vaccine disbeliever running its health services? A fraud-adjacent television doctor named to lead Medicare, a pro wrestling executive to run education, a skeevy little failson sex predator as attorney general, a meme-poisoned billionaire nerd king as Lord of the federal budget? The swirl of senselessness that seems to grow with each passing day should be a familiar feeling to anyone who was forced to reckon seriously with the first iteration of a Trump presidency. It is enough to make people welcome the nominees who are merely fascist but not incompetent. That is one of its most dangerous effects.
Donald Trump is an aggressively ignorant man who doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect him personally. He doesn’t know much about issues of consequence and is picking his cabinet based upon who has done the best job of flattering him and who he has seen on television. The fact that this is a ridiculous thing to do — a method that a child operating in a dream might use, a fearful abdication of responsibility that will surely have terrible consequences for the entire world — does not matter. He is the president and this is how he is. The American people decided to forsake the opportunity to prevent this, in favor of the entertainment value of watching it play out. We can torture ourselves by trying to impose mental order on the chaos that is to come, but it is not the best use of our time.
Reading the mind of a dumb man has no payoff. The Reign of the Dumb is a black hole for attacks of the intellect. It is going to happen much faster than any complex theories about it can be usefully employed. What is worth thinking deeply about is not what will happen, but how we got here. The fact of the Dumb Tidal Wave is already upon us.
The question of how our nation became so disgusted by the myth of politics-as-public-service that it happily embraced the apocalyptic politics-as-Squid Game we now face is one that can actually do us some good. That question, you see, is not about the dumb man himself, or his retinue of cretins, or the wearisome parade of sociopathic looting that our government is about to endure. It is instead about all the nice, respected, smart people who came before him, and how their justifications for the sociopathic looting of the past grew so transparent that they disappeared.
Run a system without humane values long enough and people will crave for nothing more than to laugh while it burns. The only thing left now is to rebuild it better when the smoke clears.
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Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
