The Fundamental Trump error

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a post about how one of Trump’s superpowers is the way people just hold him to ridiculously low standards.  Statements and actions that would seemingly be career-ending for Trump just seem to end up in this bizarre “well, that’s Trump ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” kind of space from voters and the media.  Today as I was thinking that’s it’s actually so pervasive and extreme that it reminds me of some of our deep-seated cognitive biases, like the fundamental attribution error, 

The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual’s tendency to attribute another’s actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions.

For instance, if you’ve ever chastised a “lazy employee” for being late to a meeting and then proceeded to make an excuse for being late yourself that same day, you’ve made the fundamental attribution error.

Obviously, not all of us are doing this with Trump, but it seems like as a political culture, the massive collective shrug of “well, that’s just Trump” is not all that dissimilar.  And, for those of us who believe in principles like democracy, rule of law, accountability, and heck, not making all policy for rich cronies, frustrating as hell.  Some recent examples.

Brian Klaas, “Trump Rants About Sharks, and Everyone Just Pretends It’s Normal: Par for the course. Trump is Trump. But imagine the response if Joe Biden had said it.”

Hours before meeting with his probation officer about his recent felony convictions, a leading candidate for U.S. president went on a bizarre rant about sharks.

Sharks, Donald Trump claimed, were attacking more frequently than usual (not true) and posed a newfound risk because boats were being required to use batteries (not true), which would cause them to sink because they were too heavy (really, really not true—the world’s heaviest cruise ship, the Icon of the Seas, managed to stay afloat because of the laws of physics despite weighing more than 550 million pounds).

Trump, undeterred by truth or science, invoked his intellectual credentials by mentioning his “relationship to MIT.” (Trump’s uncle was a professor at the university, pioneering rotational radiation therapy, which seems a somewhat tenuous connection for conferring shark- or battery-related expertise to his nephew.) If Trump had been able to ask his uncle about the risks of being electrocuted by a boat battery because, as Trump put it, “there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water,” perhaps the professor would have informed him that high-capacity batteries would rapidly discharge in seawater and pose minuscule risk to humans because the water conducts electricity far better than human bodies do.

Sharks appear to have troubled Trump’s mind for years. On July 4, 2013, Trump twice tweeted about them, saying, “Sorry folks, I’m just not a fan of sharks—and don’t worry, they will be around long after we are gone.” Two minutes later, he followed that nugget of wisdom with: “Sharks are last on my list—other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!”

These deranged rants are tempting to laugh off. They’re par for the course. Trump is Trump. But Trump may also soon be the president of the United States. Imagine the response if Joe Biden had made the same rambling remarks, word for word. Consider this excerpt:

“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’ By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of shark … I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy.”

Coming from Biden, that exact statement might have prompted calls from across the political spectrum for him to drop out of the race. From Trump, it was a blip that barely registered. I’ve previously called this dynamic “the banality of crazy”: Trump’s ludicrous statements are ignored precisely because they’re so routine—and routine occurrences don’t drive the news. They are the proverbial “dog bites man” stories that get ignored by the press. Except that even this truism breaks down when it comes to the asymmetry between coverage of Trump and Biden: Based on Google News tallies, the news story about Biden’s dog biting a Secret Service agent spurred far more press coverage than Trump saying that he would order shoplifters to be shot without a trial if he became president.

And Tom Nichols, “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish”

Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. But Trump is not a normal person, and his speeches are not normal political events.

For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks…

Nor was the Vegas monologue the first time: Trump for years has fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in the national consciousness. I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.

Why hasn’t there been more sustained and serious attention paid to Trump’s emotional state?

First, Trump’s target audience is used to him. Watch the silence that descends over the crowds at such moments; when Trump wanders off into the recesses of his own mind, they chit-chat or check their phones or look around, waiting for him to come back and offer them an applause line. For them, it’s all just part of the show…

Third, and perhaps most concerning in terms of public discussion, many people in the media have fallen under the spell of the Jedi hand-waves from Trump and his people that none of this is as disturbing and weird as it sounds. The refs have been worked: A significant segment of the media—and even the Democratic Party—has bought into a Republican narrative that asking whether Trump is mentally unstable is somehow biased and elitist, the kind of thing that could only occur to Beltway mandarins who don’t understand how the candidate talks to normal people.

Such objections are mendacious nonsense and represent a massive double standard. As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post wrote today: “It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality.”

And, lastly, Yglesias:

Last week, Donald Trump blurted out at a meeting with congressional Republicans that he favors switching to a McKinley-style system in which the American government relies on tariffs for all of its revenue. This reminded of a larger point that I think is often forgotten: When Trump was President of the United States, he did a really terrible job.

In a funny way, his tendency to muse about policy ideas that don’t make any sense and reflect a total lack of comprehension of the issues relates to one of his political strengths. Most people don’t pay that much attention to politics and have relatively low levels of policy knowledge. Swing voters, meanwhile, tend to be below-average in their level of interest in politics and policy. So Trump, by being not just ignorant but willfully disinterested, comes across as more in touch with the electorate than a typical politician.

But in most cases, you would not hire someone for a job if he had no idea what he was talking about…

The whole time that Barack Obama was president, he was asking congressional Republicans to enact additional expansionary fiscal policy to boost the economy. They kept saying no, no, no, can’t do it because we care so much about debt and deficits. And when Obama proposed a deal that combined short-term stimulus with long-term deficit reduction, they said no, no, no, we can’t do that, either. Then Trump becomes president, and Republicans turn on a dime, not only cutting taxes but agreeing to increase spending.

That’s the whole Donald Trump miracle economy. Paul Ryan and his colleagues deliberately sabotaged the recovery during Obama’s presidency, and stopped sabotaging once Trump took office. The results were totally fine (until Covid, at which point they weren’t) but there’s no evidence of any deep insights or policy efficacy that would lead you to expect strong out-of-sample performance. If we currently had a demand-constrained economy being sabotaged by Mike Johnson, that would be one thing. But it’s not the case. The best thing you can say about Trump is he didn’t wreck the status quo.

And I never even wrote a post about how if any other presidential candidate had his own vice president declare him unfit for the job this would be absolutely epic news.  And, yet, I suspect you barely even remember when that happened. That’s insane.  And, on a socio-political level, Fundamental Trump Error doesn’t seem that far off.