Clown Show

Chaos and incompetence are back. Here are the reasons things aren't apt to improve.

Way back in the early days of the second Donald Trump presidency – Monday – Molly White reported:

The people now in charge of the Office of Personnel Management apparently don’t know how to scrub PDF metadata, and have exposed the original authors of the guidance they’re publishing. Two, Noah Peters and James Sherk, have links to the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.

To which I replied:

There are going to be so many "The people now in charge of...apparently don't know how to...."

And that was before the buffoonish (and lawless, and unconstitutional) attempt to impose a freeze on much of government spending, followed by a clarification that no one understood, then an injunction against it, then a memo withdrawing the original plan, and then a message from the press secretary saying that the withdrawal maybe didn’t really count…which produced a second judge ruling against the administration.

Okay. I’m not going to make the full case here, but I think we’ve seen enough to know that we’re once again seeing chaos and not ruthless efficiency in Trump II.¹ So it’s time to talk about why that is. Because there’s an important structural reason to expect competence to be an uphill battle for this administration.

I think everyone who pays attention knows one of the reasons to expect Donald Trump’s presidency to have trouble governing. The president himself is deeply ignorant and resists learning anything. That was most obviously true at the beginning of the pandemic, but it’s constantly causing him trouble, whether it’s on tariffs or NATO or pretty much anything else. He (thinks he) knows what he knows, and he doesn’t want to hear anything to the contrary. That’s pretty obviously a potential source of all sorts of trouble.²

The related problem, also fairly obvious, is that Trump hires for demonstrations of abject loyalty. Not know-how. So not only is Trump himself poorly informed, but he doesn’t hire for expertise and therefore doesn’t get much of it.

But there’s also a less visible and less personal source of trouble.

Trump exited his first term convinced that a “deep state” of the bureaucracy had repeatedly thwarted his desires, and he appears determined to prevent that from happening again. The idea of a “deep state” is nonsense, but the idea that the civil service often resists presidential directives is very much true. Only in some cases, however, is it because bureaucrats oppose the president’s policy goals. It happens (and not always in the direction Trump thinks), but it’s not the main reason.

Far more common is bureaucratic resistance because they just don’t do things that way.

That too can be for foolish reasons. Bureaucracies tend to have a strong status quo bias; civil servants may not like to learn new procedures, or simply believe purely out of habit that the way things have always been done is the only way things can be done.

More often, however, what happens is that the civil servants who actually carry out policies know quite a bit about the practical constraints involved. In other words: They know how things work. Something that presidents and most White House staffers don’t know, because it’s not their business to know.

The best story about this remains Watergate. The short version: Richard Nixon asked the FBI and other agencies to do a bunch of illegal and improper stuff. They refused. Nixon decided to have a White House staffers do it anyway…and it all went very squirrely very quickly because the White House clowns had no idea how to do those things. The story of Ronald Reagan’s Iran/Contra scandal was similar, with National Security Council staff botching operations.³

Again, that isn’t so much because they were clowns; it’s because knowing how to run and operate government programs really does take a lot of on-the-ground experience, and the people who have that expertise are the civil servants who actually have been doing the job. So, yes, sometimes they’ll push back against a president’s wishes because they disagree on policy or because they’re just being stubborn, but more often they’ll push back because they know of real dangers – to the public, to the policy, to the president – and they’re trying to help avoid them.

Good presidents are able to sniff out what kind of bureaucratic resistance they’re dealing with. So are good White House staffers and good political people in the executive branch. They learn when it’s best to pressure an agency to get with the program, but also when it’s best to modify their plans to account for what they’re learning from the people who know the agency best. That’s often difficult! But learning how to do it well is a big part of the job of presidenting.

Try cutting the regular bureaucracy out of policy making and (even worse) policy execution, and the president and the White House staff are cutting themselves off from absolutely essential information. Even worse drumming individual civil servants out of government may destroy institutional memory, leaving absolutely no one who actually knows how to get things done. Trump and his allies may believe that they won’t need it, but the truth is — as they would have learned this week if they were open to learning — that dismantling government programs takes at least as much expertise as running them well.

Or as Bridget Dooling put it in Wednesday: “Here's the thing about pasting transition-written memos onto government letterhead and pushing them out. When an administration bypasses the ‘know-how meat-grinder’ of the executive branch, you get garbage, unimplementable policy.”

My strong impression is that Trump and the Project 2025 gang have spent an enormous amount of time and effort in figuring out how to get policy implemented regardless of bureaucratic resistance – and for that matter congressional, judicial, and public opinion resistance. They’ve spent a lot less time, however, trying to figure out how to actually make their new set of policies work. Or how to implement them without unnecessarily angering people – or at least without knowing in advance which folks are apt to get upset, including some who might not be obvious. We still don’t know how successful they’ll be at forcing things through, but within the first two weeks it’s already clear that the constant chaos and incompetence of Trump I is going to be the theme of the second term as well. With all the dangers that go along with that.

1. If you need just a bit more convincing, try this story.

2. It’s never possible to be certain about what anyone knows or doesn’t know. But the list of things that Trump regularly discusses without betraying even a basic understanding of the topic is long, and includes the how NATO works, who pays tariffs, the Affordable Care Act (and perhaps health insurance overall), and much more.

3. It doesn’t always end with prison sentences. Sometimes it’s just policy failure — that’s to a large extent the story of Bill Clinton’s attempt to write health care reform out of a White House task force, and one can make an argument that both Vietnam and the Iraq War were undermined by White House domination, although in both cases it’s complicated, to say the least.