Various Thoughts About Trump’s “Best People”

Background

This OP has been in the back of my mind ever since the 2016 election. In view of the upcoming election, this seems to be a reasonable time for this to get a mention.

In the 2016 election, the president promised to hire the best people to help him do the best governing that has ever been done in the history of humankind. So far, the president has criticized, forced out or fired a lot of his “best” people.

The president's criticisms of his best people included “way over his head” (fired John Kelly) “washed up” and a “liar” (resigned John Bolton), “Sloppy Steve”, “lost his mind” (fired Steve Bannon), “not smart”, “lowlife” and “wacky Omarosa” (Omarosa Manigault Newman), “clueless” (criticized but still in power Fed Chairman Jerome Powell) and “moron”, “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell” (resigned former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson).

In his own words, the president hires people who are wacky, sloppy, liars, morons, dumb as rocks and so forth. Clearly, the president is not very good when it comes to being able to pick people that he thinks are the best of the best. For him, it's a matter of trial and error.

Of course, how one sees this can depend on how one defines the best people. By now it is clear, what the president meant by the best people, was not competent or honest people. He meant people who would be loyal to him above the Constitution, the rule of law, truth and common decency. That casts the concept of best people in a very different light than how most people probably think of it.

Others have commented on the qualities of two of the people the president had in his administration, Michael Flynn and Larry Kudlow.

General Michael Flynn and the WYSIATI bias

In their 2012 book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner specifically single out two people to exemplify the reasons for big mistakes or even continuing incompetence of people who sometimes rise to power. This was in 2012, not 2015 or 2016. Flynn was the president's top national security advisor for a short while in 2016. The president did not criticize Flynn. Despite his felony conviction, Flynn has stayed loyal to the president, not the Constitution, the rule of law or the American people.

They wrote this about Flynn, who is now a self-confessed felon-level liar that the president is trying to save from justice:

“Consider a 2014 interview with General Michael Flynn .... ‘I come into this office every morning .... I spend two to three hours reading intelligence reports. I will frankly tell you that what I see each day is the most uncertain, chaotic and confused international environment that I've witnessed in my entire career. .... I think we're in a period of prolonged societal conflict that is pretty unprecedented.’ Much of what Flynn said is too vague to be judged, but his final line isn’t. Societal conflict at a pretty unprecedented level] is an empirical claim that can be checked by reviewing the many reports that have quantified global violence since World War II. And what they all show, broadly, is that interstate wars have been declining since the 1950s and civil wars have been declining since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.”

Tetlock and Gardner point out that all Flynn had to do was Google the phrase ‘global conflict trends’ to find this out. Flynn had succumbed to the powerful unconscious WYSIATI (what you see is all there is) bias. He assumed he knew it all from reading the intelligence reports. His false belief was so deep that he simply could not see that he was awash in assumptions. He mistook an easily testable false assumption for certain knowledge. 

Flynn was too arrogant to self-question to step outside the bubble of false certainty he lived in. It was probably a combination of Flynn’s smug arrogance, his sycophancy and the fact that Obama had fired him that led the president to pick Flynn as his unfortunately incompetent security advisor and likely traitor. 

One can imagine that all of this would be lost on our clueless president and/or of no concern in view of Flynn’s probable sycophancy during the sloppy job application process the president employed. Right, best people.

Larry Kudlow and the deadly big idea bias

In their book, Tetlock and Gardner refer to people they call hedgehogs. Those folks have one big idea about something they believe is really important, even if it is false or tenuous. Their weakness tends to be that they make reality fit with their big idea, even when reality just does not fit. They cannot see this bias. It leads some to incredible heights of incompetence. Larry Kudlow is a hedgehog. The president made him the Director of the United States National Economic Council 2018. Tetlock and Gardner wrote:

“Larry Kudlow hosted a business talk show on CNBC and is a widely published pundit, but he got his start as an economist in the Reagan administration, and later worked with Art Laffer, the economist whose theories were the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Kudlow’s one big idea is supply-side economics.”

Tetlock and Gardner go on to point out that Kudlow's supply side bias led him to be one of the blindest, worst economic forecasters in the pundit business. In the recession and financial meltdown that started in 2017, Kudlow asserted in December of that year that “there is no recession. In face we're about to enter the seventh consecutive year of the ‘Bush Boom’”. That was the month the recession officially started.

For months after that, Kudlow remained unaware of what was happening because his big idea ideology blinded him to what was happening at the time. In April 2008, Kudlow wrote “President George w. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.” Later in the summer of 2008 he said “We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.” He repeated that mantra until September 15, 2008, the date that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and financial chaos erupted.

Unfortunately, Kudlow is one of the president's best people who are still in government and still being incompetent. That shows that at least he is still loyal to the president, which makes him among the best.