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About the fact that the current president of the United States of America is in the habit of saying astoundingly stupid things in public, there is no debate — how could there be? The debate on the right is mainly between Trump partisans who believe, or at least claim they believe, that President Trump is in the habit of saying astoundingly stupid things in public as part of a grand political scheme (twelve-dimensional chess!) and those who believe that President Trump is in the habit of saying astoundingly stupid things in public because . . . of the more straightforward reason.Jamie Kirchick of the Brookings Institution wryly observes: “Everything Trump says makes sense when you just preface it with, ‘Donald from Queens, you’re on the air’.†I do not know if Kirchick intended his remark this way, but his joke actually splits the difference between the grand-design explanation of Trump’s ridiculousness and the he’s-just-an-ordinary-fool explanation. There’s a reason Trump sounds like your chemtrail-obsessed uncle or that guy at work who’s always going on about Q-Anon, trafficking in a poisonous mix of conspiracy theories, scapegoating, and resentment-driven politics . . . . . . Donald Trump is clearly a creature of ignorance. No other sort of man would be capable of writing these sentences: “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. When we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore — we win big. It’s easy!†There isn’t a serious economist or businessman in these United States who really believes that. But it may sound good on talk radio and social media, and Trump is at the very least clever enough to understand that his core partisans are ignorant enough about the underlying issues that their sense of tribal loyalty is almost certain to overwhelm whatever critical thinking they may bring to the question.Trump doesn’t know much, but he knows enough to know that that doesn’t much matter, at least as a question of the crude calculation of his own self-interest — the only subject to which he gives serious thought.Call it rational ignorance with a vengeance, rational ignorance with malice aforethought.
