What I Got Wrong about Trump

The reckoning you've been waiting for

I’ve been doing something of a media tour on my Trump regret. See The New York Times, Breaking Points, Destiny, and Vox/NPR. As we approach Trump’s 100-day mark, it feels like I should explain in a more comprehensive way why I believe things have gone so poorly, how I was wrong, and how this experience will influence how I see the world going forward. The truth is that although I showed poor judgment in deciding to vote Trump in the end, it was mostly because I failed to take my own ideas to their logical conclusion.

The Three Wars: the Economy, Science, and the Rule of Law

There are many reasons to criticize the Trump administration, but to me there are three policy areas in particular that are most worthy of attention. We could classify them as the war on the economy, the war on science, and the war on the rule of law.

My main argument for Trump before the election was that economic growth was what mattered most. I also made arguments, see here and here, that said that even if Trump and his movement are no more freedom-loving or decent than their opponents – and in fact they’re much worse – the left tends to be more effective when it decides to restrict liberty, in part because it can rely on having elites on its side.

The idea that Trump would be good for growth always depended on him not taking his anti-immigration or anti-trade rhetoric too seriously when it came to making policy. On the campaign trail, he promised a 10% universal tariff, which was radical but seemed to be the extreme end of what he might do. The stock market appeared to agree before the trade wars started. For reference, note that the effective tariff rate under the first Trump administration only rose to just under 3%, from 1.5% in 2016. This time, he’s set 10% as a floor, while having much higher rates for most of the world, albeit with some major exceptions thus far. Last I checked, estimates are that we’ll get an effective tariff rate of over 25% for this year.

Of course, this policy can change at any time. He’s been going back and forth on implementation and what exactly the rates will be, adding a disastrous level of economic uncertainty. This is bad for all the reasons mainstream economists say it is, and I don’t have much to add to their analyses.

Something like this happening on trade was at least somewhat foreseeable. But I don’t think many people predicted major cuts to scientific funding. The administration has proposed a 44% reduction in the NIH budget, along with a 55% cut to the NSF, which appears to have provoked its director to resign. Hundreds of millions in grants have been cancelled, and although some of them are related to DEI-initiatives that do not contribute useful knowledge to the world, other kinds of research have also been affected. Even if Congress doesn’t fully go along with proposed cuts to the NIH and NSF, the work of these institutions has already been severely disrupted. The administration has been putting bureaucratic and legal obstacles in the way of approving new grants and paying out funds that have already been awarded.

There appears to be little pressure within the administration to reverse course and a lot of this activity seems to be driven by a blanket hostility towards scientists and a determination that something must be cut rather than any rational budgetary analysis, meaning that we should expect more of these kinds of policies in the future. In addition to what is happening to government agencies, Trump’s assault on Harvard and other universities has disrupted work going on at some of our premier scientific institutions. While it is legitimate to challenge universities over DEI practices, there is no legal or rational policy basis for the administration to demand “viewpoint diversity” across departments or that foreign students be screened according to political criteria. It’s been disappointing watching conservatives who understand the problem of wokeness focus on the DEI part of the Harvard letter and simply ignore the rest, or engage in whataboutism to justify administration actions or deflect from a real consideration of the issues involved.

A grim irony here is that while DOGE claimed it would cut spending and make government more efficient, it basically left alone the dominant parts of the federal budget – entitlements and the military – while focusing on scientific research, which is probably one of the most cost-effective things Washington spends money on, in addition to firing government employees. There is an overwhelming body of literature showing massive returns to such investments. The reason for this is that there are certain kinds of fundamental scientific research that firms are unlikely to pay for, because the gains are potentially diffuse and the time horizons involved are too long. I tend to be skeptical of the vast majority of government spending, but the empirical data and theoretical arguments both convince me that scientific funding is an exception to the general rule that most things should be left to the private sector. The NSF, NIH, and American universities, which run on government money, are major engines of scientific progress, and we should take a Burkean approach to the system here and not go around recklessly breaking things without having an alternative, even for the sake of fighting DEI. And given how stupid we now know tech bros are, maybe we have new reason to doubt the wisdom of the private sector anyway. I like Erik Hoel’s argument that money can corrupt science, and sometimes you just want smart people to be able to work on things they find interesting. We’ve also seen a completely senseless policy of harassing foreign students, although thankfully the worst steps taken appear to have been reversed.

Before DOGE got to work, the opening shot of Trump’s war on science was him naming RFK as Secretary of Health and Human Services. I was on Destiny’s livestream the night of the election, which is fortunate for documenting what I was thinking at the time. I assured him that Trump would not appoint RFK, and if he did, I might be ready to say that I had made a mistake. I was of course wrong, and now HHS is censoring research to fit with RFK’s preconceptions, scientists are being told to scrub work on mRNA technology from their resumes, and an anti-vaxxer has been appointed to get to the bottom of the autism issue.

Finally, there is the assault on the rule of law and fundamental American institutions. Much has been written about Abrego Garcia and similar cases, and they’re disturbing enough. As with the tariffs, here I don’t have much to add. Disappearing people into third world prisons without a trial or any evidence of wrongdoing is bad. And given that we’re now seeing the Trump administration float the idea of sending American-born criminals to El Salvador too, it’s reasonable to worry about where this might all lead if they’re able to get away with what they’re doing.

I also think that firing Chris Wray and appointing Kash Patel in his place is an extremely underrated landmark in our heading towards banana republic territory. We had a norm under which the head of the FBI was not beholden to any particular president, with directors serving ten-year terms. Trump fired Comey in his first administration, which violated one part of that norm, but he at least appointed a serious person like Chris Wray in his place, and Biden kept him on. But Patel is not a serious person, would not be considered for the position under any other president, and his entire claim to fame is being among the most ridiculous Trump sycophants in public life. Similar things are happening at the DOJ, with Trump personally directing entities to be investigated and picking an Attorney General whose shamelessness in worshipping the president would be an outlier in any other administration, though in this one she is overshadowed by Patel. In terms of personal corruption, Trump is handing out pardons and commutations to donors like candy and planning to host his top memecoin holders at the White House.

When they try to defend this, MAGAs will respond by saying that the criminal justice system was weaponized against Trump first, and arguing that other administrations have been corrupt. Trump has a case that the New York state prosecution was overreach. The prosecutions related to trying to overturn the election and hiding classified information, in contrast, were clearly legitimate, and the fact that he attempted a coup in front of the whole world in 2020 and did not face consequences before he was elected president again four years later shows that if anything the Biden administration and federal officials were too slow and hesitant in working to hold him to account. And when the president is literally running a memecoin scam from the White House, it just makes clear how bad faith all the chirping about Hunter Biden and Hillary’s emails always were.

The functioning of democracy relies on political actors not only following the explicit strictures of the law, but adhering to certain norms. Nowhere in the Constitution does it forbid the president to simply pardon people based on whether they contributed to his campaign or kiss up to him in press interviews. Past presidents have rarely used this power for corrupt purposes, and when they did, they usually were ashamed enough and worried enough about the political backlash to wait until they were finishing their terms. Clinton pardoned 140 people and commuted 36 sentences on his last day in office, and many of them were controversial, especially those given to the financier Marc Rich and his half-brother Roger. Yet Trump is from the beginning acting like Clinton did as he was walking out the door, and in many cases much worse, as can be seen in the nearly 1,600 pardons granted to participants in the attacks of January 6.

I don’t know how we ever reestablish norms like the president should not directly tell top law enforcement officials who to investigate, or he should exercise some discretion in deciding who to pardon. Trump is so corrupt and operates so far outside the bounds of mainstream norms that he forces other actors in the system into difficult situations. As he was leaving office, Biden gave preemptive pardons to his family members and people Trump was threatening to prosecute like Anthony Fauci. This was a bad move, and he was widely criticized for it in the press, but Biden’s actions were at least understandable. Trump was coming into office openly saying he would politicize the criminal justice system to go after his enemies. The Hunter pardon we might have some sympathy for at a human level, while still opposing it. But no reasonable person believes that Trump would have ever let it get to the point where one of his sons had been convicted of a crime in the first place, or even put on trial. We’re just at a moment when one side of the political spectrum has simply stopped even pretending to care about things like corruption and the rule of law. Democrats can’t be expected to play the role of suckers forever. Trump’s lies about how corrupt the American system is, told simply because it tried to hold him accountable for his crimes, have started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Low Human Capital Poisons Everything

In the end, the poor predictions I made mostly come down to getting a single thing wrong. I simply misjudged the degree to which the Trump movement had become a cult of personality.

Take the RFK appointment. While I thought it was possible Trump might want to give him a high-level position, I believed that he would worry about getting him confirmed, since many Senate Republicans have conventional views on public health. And indeed, there was talk that Bill Cassidy, a doctor who chairs the Senate health committee, would vote against him, which could have given cover for others to do so. I also thought that if Trump tried to do something like appoint Patel to run the FBI, Senate Republicans would push back, since they would consider breaking the norm of non-partisan law enforcement to be a big deal. This is what happened when he first named Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General, showing that there was at least some theoretical limit to what he could get away with.

Likewise, what’s disturbing about the tariff back and forth that began with “Liberation Day” isn’t simply the awfulness of the policy outcomes, but how decisions have been made. The Washington Post reports that there was basically no pushback from within the administration. The article notes that “Miller and Vance in particular… continually expressed deference to Trump’s preferences — reiterating that they were in favor of whatever the president wanted to do.” Recall Vance’s trip to Greenland, where he gave away more than he probably intended when declaring “we cannot just ignore the president’s desires.”

The people still in Trump’s orbit have gone through an evolutionary process where the main mechanism of selection is proficiency in kissing Trump’s ass, and something similar has happened to a more limited degree among Republican elected officials. One small but telling example: the FTC chairman in early April decided, for at least a few meetings, to replace his American flag pin with a bust of Trump. Congressional Republicans have introduced a series of bills focused on honoring the president, including ones putting him on Mount Rushmore, naming an airport after him, and creating a $250 bill just to put Trump’s face on it. I think there was a time when stuff like this might have been done ironically and to troll the libs, but we’re way past that point now. This is all yet another demonstration of the tendency for people to become what they pretend to be when they’re trolling.

I had of course written a lot on the Trump cult before the election. But I had clearly over indexed on the first administration. Back in 2017, we could say that the right was maybe 40% a Trump cult, and 60% conservative ideology. Trump had to do quite a bit to reassure conservatives in the 2016 election, like bring on Mike Pence as his running mate and promise to appoint Heritage-approved judges (back when Heritage itself wasn’t completely MAGA-fied). I thought that by 2024, we were at a balance of maybe 60% Trump cult, and 40% conservative ideology. But I was wrong, and we were at a place of something like 80% Trump cult, and 20% conservative ideology. Moreover, what we call “conservative ideology” in 2024 is not what it was in 2016. It’s more conspiratorial, less enamored by free markets, more pro-Putin abroad, and anti-vaxx. Recall how Operation Warp Speed was the main thing on which Trump got pushback from his base during the 2024 campaign.

Whether we are talking about conservative voters, conservative media, executive branch appointees, or Republican elected officials, little matters now outside this one man’s will. Trump was always a corrupt budding authoritarian with insane views about trade, but he had previously been restrained by other forces within the conservative movement, along with the fact that he was surrounded by individuals who at least had a moral compass and some connection to reality. It’s become clear, however, that in national politics there isn’t much of a conservative movement left outside of the Trump cult of personality. Even if Republican politicians or conservative media figures are themselves not Trump cultists, they depend on voters and an audience that puts loyalty towards one man above all else.

I also did not foresee how pernicious the influence of Elon Musk was, as it is DOGE ideology that is behind much of the war on science. Musk’s power comes from the same source as that of RFK. He was given his own personal domain in which to operate as payback for what he did in order to help Trump get elected. If you told me Elon would be running large parts of the government before the election, I would have thought that wouldn’t have been the worst possible outcome. But, although the signs were all there, I didn’t think he would turn out to be this aggressively anti-intellectual and uninformed about policy.

Overall, not only did I not take seriously enough my views of the Trump cult, but I underestimated the more social effects of Low Human Capital. If you’re a smart person who finds yourself on the side of a movement without an intellectual class leading it, or in this case even a place at the table, you will usually see that good ideas are rare, and those that do make it through will get applied in stupid ways. We were promised smaller and more efficient government. What we got was cuts to basic scientific research, data collection, and offices whose job it is to uncover fraud, all the while overall spending remains the same or even goes up. If you dislike bureaucracy hindering scientific research, there are privacy restrictions and ethics boards you can go after, but knowing this would require having smart people with a voice within the conservative coalition and being willing to listen to them. Similarly, anger against covid totalitarianism is justified. But in the hands of Low Human Capital, it turns into anti-vaxx rather than steps taken to engage in more rational cost-benefit analysis on public health issues. Going after DEI is great, but instead of simply doing that, we have an administration demanding that MAGAs get more representation in the Harvard physics department, which would require affirmative action practiced at a level beyond anything we have ever seen before.

Already before the election, my thinking was that there were two axes to think about: a conservative-liberal divide, and one based on levels of human capital. I decided that since I had conservative political beliefs, I could look past the undeniable fact that the right had become significantly stupider and more corrupt than the left, and things would work out. But that was a miscalculation. The intellectual and moral state of the conservative movement was actually much worse than I thought, and it’s simply not realistic to expect smart policy or competent governance from a movement this dumb, or even the ability to consistently avoid self-inflicted disasters. Even intelligent people, when they’re part of MAGA, become stupid when it comes to policy, even if they can be savants in terms of flattering the ego of one man, as we’ve seen in the case of JD Vance. The right is an epistemological wasteland right now, and anyone who relies on it for information or seeks camaraderie within its confines eventually becomes Catturd, even independent of the influence of Trump himself. A movement this low in human capital simply poisons everything. Even when it gets an underlying principle right like opposition to DEI or the need to make government more efficient, the cures it favors will be worse than the disease due to the incentives created by a Republican base and media landscape that have seen a major brain drain over the last decade and make fealty to Trump their main priority.

The Trump cult and the human capital problems are of course related. Smart people who care about ideas have trouble understanding the degree to which regular people sometimes simply want a leader to worship. I believe that the masses in those old black-and-white videos of German crowds fawning over Hitler were expressing genuine conviction, as do those who make shows of loyalty to Kim Jong-Un today. Over the last decade, the American right has proved that you do not need to establish totalitarian institutions first in order to create a large political movement based on the worship of a leader.

Our intellectual elites have spent years trying to come up with rational reasons why the GOP base loves Trump. We have been told that it is because he, perhaps, challenged the neoliberalism of Paul Ryan types or fought the left most aggressively. This is projection, as elites don’t really get that cults of personality that don’t have much of an ideological basis can emerge among the masses. The spectacular failure of the DeSantis campaign, who ran on Trump’s policies without the baggage, helped prove this. We’ve generally avoided leader worship throughout most of American history, but unfortunately we’re in an era where one unusually charismatic man has cast a spell over a large share of the public, and has now spent close to a decade using his power to purge or neutralize anyone who could potentially challenge his hegemonic status among his slice of the electorate.

A Psychological Perspective

At this point, you’re probably thinking that I clearly knew much of this before the election. I could respond “I knew it was bad, but not this bad.” Honestly, that doesn’t feel satisfying. The fact that the right had become a low human capital cult wasn’t simply a passing interest of mine. I was obsessed with the idea! I was constantly talking about how awestruck I was by the moral and intellectual flaws of Trump, his base, and conservative media.

So I probably should have put a lot more weight on the possibility that things would be this bad. For this reason, we need a psychological explanation for how I could be so wrong. I was particularly disturbed when Trump picked Vance as his running mate, as I thought that if this was the heir to Trumpism, that meant we were getting two statist parties into the foreseeable future. I wanted to believe that something of the old conservative ideology was still standing and vibrant, and hadn’t been completely swallowed by the MAGA cult, edge lord racism, and conspiracy theories. Basically, if things were as bad as I had reason to think they were, I would have had to in effect become a Democrat, which would have been a large psychological step to take. And I would also have needed to readjust my expectations about the long-term future of the country.

I wanted to believe that we had a social democrat party and a Reaganite party. Instead, we have a social democrat party, and a movement that in many ways has more in common with the politics of Hugo Chavez or Robert Mugabe than traditional conservative ideals. I think social democracy is bad relative to the freedom we have had in America, and that’s why the US has done so much better than Europe, while red states are beating blue states in terms of GDP and population growth. But now I believe that a party that wants to turn America into something like Western Europe is the lesser of two evils, given that the alternative is taking us towards third world levels of incompetence and corruption.

At the same time, I had written a book on civil rights law, and had good reason to think that the administration would do what I wanted on this issue. Last week, Trump signed an executive order on disparate impact, which was pretty much the last recommendation from my book he hadn’t implemented yet. Anyone would want to have that level of influence, and eventually see headlines like this.

But the victory feels empty now. What kind of merit can we expect in a world where government is demanding ideological diversity within academic departments? Or where the number one qualification for high level government office is kissing up to Trump? Or foreign trade is taxed to oblivion and the way you get exemptions is to, once again, kiss up to Trump?

I wanted wokeness to be purged from institutions because I wanted them to work better. The Trump administration’s agenda shows a hostility to science more generally, or at least a reckless indifference to it as its members seek to please their base and punish those they perceive as political enemies. It’s like you’re having a debate over how to fix the potholes on a bridge, then someone who agrees with your plan on fixing potholes comes along, but as it turns out his agenda is to blow the bridge up because he believes that it was built by Deep State plotters.

I was also getting some bad information. I talked to people close to what was going on around Trump during the transition and after, and they would assure me that, for example, RFK would not be the head of HHS, and that the tariffs wouldn’t be that extreme. When Kennedy was appointed, they switched to saying that his role was largely symbolic and that he was going to be boxed in by more techno-optimist types. I eventually realized that there was a selection effect going on. The people I was talking to were those who agreed with me on major policy issues, so were basically feeding me their own wishful thinking, which they were probably getting from others even further into Trump’s orbit who thought similarly. The tech bros weren’t pulling the strings behind the scenes and outsmarting MAHA and Peter Navarro types. They weren’t even trying, as their brains had long been melted by social media and group chats. To understand what a second Trump administration would be like, I would have been better off ignoring all supposed “insider information” and just reading the news and following the prediction markets.

Where We Go from Here

It’s possible that Trump wakes up tomorrow, declares his tariff policy a success, and repeals the whole thing. Who knows? We’ve rarely seen a politician in American history this unconstrained, and no matter what he does, conservative media and everyone in his administration will praise him as a genius. If he reverses himself on trade, we’ll get some economic relief, but still have the underlying problem of being ruled by a crazy person who has filled his administration with toadies and achieved complete psychological domination over his coalition.

I’m convinced that the problem with conservatism isn’t just limited to Trump. I used to hold onto hope that he would eventually go away and maybe things would get back to normal. But Elon is in many ways an even more sinister figure, and the fact that the two most prominent leaders of the American right happen to be the two most dishonest people in public life cannot be a coincidence. Trump appointed the country’s most famous medical crank to head HHS, and his most prominent adviser on trade is arguably the worst economist who has a public profile. Again, this can’t be a coincidence! Here we have two completely different policy areas, and you get two of the worst figures imaginable in top positions. Moreover, neither has views that would have been considered anywhere close to the Republican mainstream even a few years ago.

Vance will probably be the nominee in 2028, and he’s sometimes said to be a smarter version of Trump. Yet his worldview is basically that markets are bad, elites are bad, and all problems can be solved by bashing foreigners and feeding demagogic slop to the most deranged people online – which, to be fair, is what intellectual Trumpism actually looks like. With Vance, you’d get less pure incompetence, so there would be no going back and forth an endless number of times on tariffs. Instead, we would see more comprehensive and focused efforts to take the worst ideas of the right and left and put them together. AOC-style socialism would at least preserve merit at an international level and remain open to the world, in addition to getting pushback from Republicans.

The problem here isn’t with any particular politician. It’s that we’re in a terrible equilibrium, where the aggressive cranks have all consolidated into one party. The new “intellectuals” of the right are shaped by the same dynamics and ultimately subservient to them. Either they’re reverse engineering Trump’s nonsensical ideas, like Oren Cass does at American Compass, or they’re engaging in bizarre escapism like talk of monarchy or a Nietzschean revolution, which could in theory be interesting, but in practical terms have always come to mean flattering the prejudices and instincts of Fox-watching boomers.

The main fault here lies with the conservative base, and Trump’s historical role was to eliminate the last vestiges of an old establishment that could often channel their anger to productive ends. At the state level, conservatism remains largely healthy, as we can see in the way that red states, particularly Florida and Texas, have been performing over the last few decades. This is because the major conservative influencers – from Fox News to Elon Musk to Catturd – and their audiences focus much less on state and local races, which allows business interests and Zombie Reaganism to continue having an influence. But presidential politics and to a lesser extent Congress are dominated by a poisoned intellectual ecosystem.

I don’t think Trump goes away as a political force after finishing his second term. Even if he doesn’t try to run again, there will be a large portion of the Republican base that will see everything through the lens of how to serve Trump’s psychological needs and interests. Just like the GOP has an anti-abortion wing and a pro-gun wing, it will always have a Trump cult wing that is at least as powerful as those other interest groups and will exert a major influence on the direction of the party. Post-presidency, you can imagine, for example, Trump directing his efforts to making sure any future Republican administration prosecutes his enemies and invests government money in his memecoin or real estate properties, and internet influencers calling anyone who opposes such policies a Deep State plant. If Trump faces new legal troubles, conservative media will find it difficult to focus on anything else. Right-wing audiences will likely consider a continuation of the Trump show a lot more entertaining than debates about the federal budget, even if he is out of office. Trump worship continuing to be a mobilizing feature of right-wing politics means conservatism will continue to repel decent and honest people, which will make it difficult to fix the human capital problem.

I always said that if Trump lost in 2024, he would be the nominee in 2028, and people often responded that there was no way he would maintain his level of prestige after being a two-time loser. Yet after he lost in 2020, he single-handedly forced the entire conservative movement to say that he won, despite the fact that his status after January 6 was diminished to the point that Mitch McConnell thought Trump was so finished as a political force that there was no need to bother voting to convict him in the second impeachment trial. The theory that “conservatism is becoming little more than a Trump cult” has held up extremely well for nearly a decade now, and even though I subscribed to it before the last election, my main mistake was that I underestimated its strength. If you continue to believe that something as insignificant as Trump looking like a loser in an election or not being eligible to run again can break the spell, you still are not getting the nature of this phenomenon.

I don’t know how exactly you fix something as broken as the national Republican Party and the culture of conservatism. I just know that until something changes, this coalition must be prevented from having power. The open embrace of corruption and lawlessness on the right will create incentives for the other side to behave similarly, and the only way I see around a race to the bottom affecting both parties is if Democrats begin to dominate national politics, which may help them feel secure enough to maintain their commitment to the rule of law.