One Debacle After Another

I feel we are living through a spectacle, and it's important not to underestimate the power of stupidity. Keynes' timeless advice: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," I feel applies not just potential financial harms, but all harms, including physical.

That said, the rest of this post will be about the spectacle in a rather sanguine way, I will spend little to no time discussing the human impact of watching the wheels fall off the United States.

What is bad?

I won't provide a definitive answer. So let me bluster straight into - something is "bad" because it won't work. It won't accomplish what it set out to do.

I had friends over for dinner last night, and one of them was relating an anecdote about the general publics' ability to form beliefs without reference to facts. A plausible anecdote where somebody whose main concern is immigration is asked why they are concerned about immigration, they say it is too high, asked then how high they think it is, they say something between 20-30% then asked what they think immigration should be they say something like 1-2% and then the punchline is that net immigration is actually within their target range.

Net overseas migration for 2024-2025 was 306k and Australia's 2025 population was roughly 27.6 million which works out to 1.1% so my fact checking works out.

Now, it is bad to blame housing affordability, cost of living, unemployment rates etc. on immigration because cracking down on immigration won't work. Whereas there's an alternative that is potentially good in looking at the Australian tax code that will likely actually solve these issues blamed on immigration.

I fear this definition might be too detailed. Imagine a company that is run by a bunch of incompetent nepo babies. They employ a CFO who is actually good at their job, that CFO brings to the board a long list of issues the company faces. It would be bad for the board to fire the CFO for complaining, and it would be good for the company to promote the CFO to CEO and empower her to address the issues they've raised.

The Bipartisan Overanalyses of Donald J Trump

Trump was always going to be a bad president. One can go back to season 1 of "The Apprentice" and have sufficient data to determine the case. Trump showed up and took less interest in the contest than Jeff Probst does in Survivor. A pattern quickly emerges in the boardroom that Trump makes superficial decisions where basically whoever was that weeks leader for the losing team got fired.

It established a simple pattern of behaviour -  Take on responsibility and fail, get fired. 

I never watched enough of the Apprentice, (after the first season, I would only ever watch Meatloaf lose his shit at Garry Busy before dipping a soccer ball in paint and dropping it on a canvas in a season of "Celebrity Apprentice") to have any expertise. But there are things I can assume never happened - Trump never identified any real business talent, none of the winners ever went on to run or found exceptionally successful businesses, though some may have become celebrities in their own right, trading on their fame.

Survivor gave players a say in who outlasted who, contestants voted and the game quickly became about forming alliances and sub-alliances in the opening minutes of "tribes" forming, then attempting to win the immunity challenges and locate immunity tokens as leverage.

The Apprentice had Trump as the ultimate arbiter of who stayed and who was "fired" from the competition, so, and this is just a guess. The winning strategy was to avoid responsibility, scapegoat and perhaps even sabotage others and then try and win the final challenge.

So before Trump's first term, we had enough data to know that he would be a "bad" president. Even prior to the primaries.

The People are Worthy of Analysis

A thought that was so frustrating, that I may merely have imagined it happening, were people who, however they felt about Trump, assumed he was "tapping into something" to explain his success in the primaries and then at the polls.

The phrase "tap into something" implies, that the tapper is not at base, identical to the something they tap into. 

I do think it is fair to say that the Democratic Party, did not tap into something, which was the peri-Obama call for change. The Democratic Party did, has, and may well continue to act as an institution that would sooner perish than respond to the voter base with meaningful change.

Whereas, my feeling is, that Trump has been frustrated as a president with his inability to just do whatever he wants as and how it makes sense to him. In this sense, I think he is identical with his base that do not think he is a bad president.

With growing wealth inequality, unfolding climate catastrophy and social alienation, there are plenty of actual reasons to be frustrated with any status quo "steady as she goes" government agenda.

But I believe that frustration is compounded if you believe that the President is some kind of absolute monarch that could wave a hand and address these serious issues, but for some reason chooses not to.

That is a "naive" presumption of the office of president, or leader of any country. I feel there's plenty of evidence that voters in a country like Australia don't fathom that the central bank independently sets interest rates. As such, if you are frsutrated by rising interest rates on your debt, you can exacerbate such frustrations by believing that the government of the day could simply order that they be lower but chooses not to.

Obama was certainly guilty of "tapping into something" and I would say cynically employed slogans like "Hope" and "Change we can believe in" that implies radical reforms but really promise and commit to nothing.

What's more believable "radical" or "modest" change? What's the difference between "hope" and "victory"?

Trump on the other hand, did not tap into anything, he got up and rambled not because he has insight into a know-nothing uncle, but because he is a know-nothing uncle.

Historically, a presidential candidate is somebody who is incredibly indebted and beholden to their party, donors, family and media with one of the least important contributors to their success being the people.

They are incredibly compromised individuals who then must compromise.

It is true that the President of the United States has been for approaching a century, truly the most powerful person on earth, but it is naive to think that translates to "all powerful" and mature to understand that means "relatively powerful."

The worthwhile analyses, need to be directed into how much or little the electoral base understand the scope, function, role, powers and limits of government and its various offices. There is a lot to suggest that in a largely disengaged voting base, too many people appear to believe a head of state could do whatever they want, but chooses not to.

The Most Complicated Aspect of Trump

Is the circumstances by which the national broadcasting corporation (NBC) cast Donald Trump on "The Apprentice."

The production needed an intersection of traits - they needed someone who could pass as a successful businessman, who was not busy running a successful business. 

To finally mention Lebron James in this post, it is my experience that very few people ask questions like "why is a 41 year old billionaire still playing basketball?" a question that requires pausing for a moment and occupying a perspective that is not that of the 8.2 Billion plus people on Earth who do not have a billion US dollars in net assets. 

Similarly, why would somebody who is a billionaire host a TV gameshow? Parking a billion dollars in an ordinary savings account might conservatively earn a modest 3%, A billion is a thousand millions, so 3% is 30 million dollars a year, doing nothing whereas Trump earned roughly 15 million per season on the Apprentice.

Did NBC approach other famous Billionaire successful businessmen - Warren Buffet, George Soros, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Wozniak, Jeff Bezos, Steve Balmer and Trump just tested the best?

I am guessing not. Trump fit the very specific criteria of somebody rich with nothing better to do than host a gameshow. 

Giving us the single hardest piece of the Trump pie to analyse - Donald Trump, unsuccessful businessman was hired by NBC to play Donald Trump, successful businessman. Basically inviting confusion between actor and the role they played.

The Easiest thing to Analyse

Trump is stupid, people (have) laud(ed) his energy with respect to his age, his ability to fly from rally to rally and speak on his feet for hours.

Conversely, youtube Destiny has a standing challenge - find a single clip, from all the media that has been focused on Donald Trump for an entire decade and counting, where anyone would say "woah, that guy knows what he's talking about."

To be clear, I don't know what stupid is, but Trump doesn't come close to smart in terms of his ability to access relevant knowledge and make a cogent case for anything, ever. Even to the extent of making statements about his own intentions that have any predictive value. 

An Impossible thing to Analyse and it's workaround

Trump is likely some kind of narcissist. There are good reasons for good rules that make it impossible to formally diagnose Trump with narcissism, anti-social pd, sociopathy or whatever. It's politically unworkable, too easily weaponised and we'd just bring about a world where all political candidates had qualified psychologists willing to testify that they are definitely narcissists and also that they definitely aren't narcissists.

I'm persuaded it should remain the case, that only a candidate who submits themselves to treatment and obtains a diagnosis that they then disclose is the way to determine whether a candidate is a narcissist.

But we can use the diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV in particular and DSM-V and then see how good it is at predicting Trumps behaviour.

It's pretty good. And this I think has become a lazy shorthand, for professionals who do know better, as more or less just saying that Trump is a narcissist.

I feel that's the way to bet. It is for example, the simplest explanation as to why Trump spent a whole news cycle denying that he called Apple CEO Tim Cook "Tim Apple" claiming that he called him "TimCookofApple" and it offers the simplest explanation as to why a visual display of Hurricane Dorian was altered with a Sharpie to look like it would impact the state of Alabama, rather than Trump simply admit he made a mistake by including Alabama in a tweet.

It also simply explains and predicts why in 2020-present Trump cannot concede that he lost the 2020 election, and bullshit raids continue.

Trump Rules

These are rules that at a minimum must be followed to work in or for the Trump administration and are accurate enough to suggest pushing further is overanalysis:

1. Trump is never wrong
2. Trump never fails
3. Trump never loses
4. Trump is never at fault

However, it is important to note that these rules refer to the officially stated position, they cannot withstand any kind of empirical enquiry. 

I have partial sympathy for those who hitched their wagon to the Trump machine in his first term and before. As late as 2016, it was likely a mistake of mediocrity to successfully identify that Trump was an idiot, but to feel you would be valued as a puppet master, a royal vizeir, that you could use the Trump phenomenon that was ultimately vacuous, to inhabit it with your own agenda. 

We saw this from a range of actors that had their moments on the stage - the sinister like Steve Bannon and warhawk John Bolton, to the more benign like Anthony Scaramucci and General John Kelly. 

It transpires that of the first term staff, the one who clocked the above rules earliest and most prominently was Steven Miller, a willingness to go along with whatever bullshit stupidity Trump came up with.

By 2020, let alone 2024 there is no grace for betting on this loser. A vote for Kamala carried with it the chance that the next 4 years would be modestly bad, far better odds than re-electing a proven loser.

The above rules, I cannot overemphasize are pretty much exactly how you need to construct an organization to guarantee catastrophic failure. Let me do a quick substitution to make them applicable across all of time and space:

1. A loser is never wrong.
2. A loser never fails.
3. A loser never loses.
4. A loser is never at fault.

These rules can now be used to identify a losing bet. Contemporary academics looking at martial strategy and philosophy may have converged and coalesced around well articulated concepts like "mindset" but there are antecedents going back to Socratic dialogues, particularly where Socrates asks Euthyphro "would God command us to not do wrong actions because they are wrong, or would wrong actions be wrong because God commands us to not do them?"

I find this is better explained by example. You think God (or Trump) is good, God appears to you and commands you to have sex with minors. Many cannot appreciate this dilemma. Probably the best option for a believer is to declare "God would never do that, what a ridiculous scenario, you are ridiculous. This is ridiculous, no further questions."

But if you have the mature capacity to entertain such a scenario, you are presented with a dilemma. Either you go with God's change in mood, in which case there is no reason anything is bad or good, there's no arguing why one should or should not have sex with minors, we just do whatever God wishes because God is powerful. (postmodernism) 

Or you would have to say "God can't command that..." because, goodness and badness are determined independent of God's preferences, God becomes falliable, and so even if you reject the scenario as impossible, you are tacitly admitting that God is not the arbiter but himself, beholden to a morality that exists outside and independent of his will.

Getting back to Trump, and in particular the organisation that is the US state, you can apply the rules to say that job losses, rising cost of living, increasing trade deficits, contracting share market, widespread loss of health care access etc. somehow constitute a "golden age" but alas, eventually the real world effects of impoverishing a nation and diminishing its standing in the world will catch up to you.

I think its already caught up

The spectacle we are living through, is an endgame, possibly an epilogue. 

January was basically Ur-fascist Gish gallop. Gish gallop is a debate tactic where instead of arguing a strong case, you spew out hundreds of shitty weak arguments making it impossible for your opponent to address and rebut the sheer volume of fallacious claims.

eg. Instead of saying "Because capital punishment has never historically delivered a deterrence or cost benefits is not to say that it cannot become a cost effective deterrent to violent crime." you say "Saudiarabiakillsdrugdealersandtraffickersandnowtheyhavenodrugsalsopeoplechoosenottobehomosexualortranswhensuchlifestylechoicesarepunishablebydeaththedrugsusedinlethalinjectioncostjustafewdollarsandchinashootspeoplesotheirdeathpenaltyisevencheapernobodyexecutedbythestatehaseverproovedtheydidntcommitthecrimeforwhichtheyvebeensentancedandthebiblecommandsustokillunbelieversandnotsufferwitchestolivebyallowingwitchestoliveandpracticetheirdarkartsevengoodwitchesareguiltyofrapebyconcoctinglovepotionsthatifbydefinitiontheymakesomeonefallinlovewithsomeonetheywouldnothaveotherwisethenitsrapeandrapewouldendtomorrowifpunishedbydeathpollsshow99.99percentofthegeneralpublicsupportcapitalpunishmentandfmriscansindicatethatevenbabiesasyoungassixmonthsoldsupportcapitalpunishment."

That's gishgallop, and abducting the Venezualan President, threatening to annex Greenland, inaugurating a "Board of Peace", threatening tarriffs, making staff changes in DHS, even the release of the Melania documentary are all gishgallop for an administration that is underwater due to its complete systemic incompetence. Incompetence that stem from the loser-rules. 

The outcomes for many, I'm sure are already tragic. Individuals beyond those killed by ICE no doubt have already suffered immensely, with numerous Trump insiders already having been jailed, bankrupted etc before the second term even began.

There is however a massive educational opportunity to be missed - which is to put into living memory the knowledge that narcissists simply cannot perform. 

I don't believe in moral progress, but I do feel that in the latter half of the 20th century, Fascism was completely unviable because there were too many people that knew the result of the experiment. It likely made a comeback because too many 20th century people died off, and as per Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, its a very naive, very intuitive doctrine that likely will keep being reinvented.

Similarly, I meet successful business people that have learned to spot narcissism and avoid it. But it is a very inefficient process where each person basically needs to be scammed or burned once by a narcissist to learn that talk is cheap and grow leery of confidence. 

Here we have this well publicised example, falling apart on the world stage. It is my hope that we produce a generation of people who have learned to recognize what successful business people eventually learn to spot the hard way: Narcissists do not perform.