There Are No Adults in the Room

A brief note on the inherent media problem with covering galactically stupid policies.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

On Thursday, as the stock market nosedived from the Trump administration’s stupid, unthinking, destructive, error-ridden tariff policies, a respected reporter from a well-known media outlet pinged me for an interview. The journalist was interested in the roles that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick might have played in the formulation of Trump’s foreign economic policy.

As we started talking, I realized that the reporter and I were starting from rather different premises. The reporter was thinking about the story as how one would cover a significant policy pronouncement in a normal administration: Who is the president listening to on policy? What are the possible faultlines within the administration? Who are the key power brokers? What was their decision-making process?

And I was thinking: there was no process. There are no power brokers. On questions of trade, there’s Donald Trump’s whims, his collection of clown car enablers, and maybe an intern who plugs some things into ChatGPT. That’s pretty much it.

I know why both of us were thinking the way we were. For reporters, looking for power brokers makes sense even when even when the policies themselves seem inexplicable. Bad policy outcomes can nonetheless be explained by rational actors pursuing their interests. Maybe it’s the result of powerful interest groups pushing their narrow interests. On occasion, bureaucratic politics are responsible. Sometimes bad policies are the result of powerful ideas that percolate within particular groups — you know, ideas like “risk assessment is bad” or “democracy is overrated.” This is slightly more unusual but it’s certainly conceivable.

These narrative are familiar to any journalist, or anyone who has taken Political Science 101. And in their own way they are cognitively comforting. They suggest that even when the government enacts strange or counterproductive policies, there is an underlying logic and structure to what is going on. Furthermore, causal stories like interest group pressure or groupthink also suggest how bad decisions might get corrected. If, say, financial markets start to nosedive, then policymakers will react to such negative feedback with policy corrections.

So I get where the reporter is coming from. It is soothing in its rationality.

As someone who has studied Donald Trump’s decision-making style at great length, however, I come at questions about Trump’s second-term advisors from a different perspective. The key to understanding Trump’s second term is to understand three basic premises:

1. Trump has eliminated all executive branch guardrails;

2. Trump has appointed only sycophants to serve him this time around;

3. Trump’s policy instincts are the most immature, retrograde opinions out there.

Think this is an exaggeration? Let’s take a gander at Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski and Michael Birnbaum’s Washington Post story, “Inside President Trump’s whirlwind decision to blow up global trade.” It’s pretty damning:

The president’s decision to impose tariffs on trillions of dollars of goods reflects two key factors animating his second term in office: His resolve to follow his own instincts even if it means bucking long-standing checks on the U.S. presidency, and his choice of a senior team that enables his defiance of those checks….

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”….

The president’s team mounted remarkably little dissent to a sweeping overhaul of trade policy, according to interviews with more than a dozen people inside and outside the administration, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks….

“In their recruiting process, they made sure it would only be people who were totally Trumpers, because in the first administration there was a lot of trouble with people quitting, writing bad books, things like that,” said Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary during Trump’s first term. “The people now have been confirmed as true Trumpers.”

Trump seems to believe that a more loyal White House team is ultimately a more effective one. But as the now-unrestrained president's ideas on trade wreak havoc on the global economy, even some of his allies have expressed deepening confusion and alarm. Two days after the momentous rollout, financial markets continue to reel.

The very existence of this story is due to some staffers covering their ass to reporters. But make no mistake, it is solid evidence of U.S. foreign economic policy being executed by presidential whim without any functional policymaking process.

Paul Krugman explains why the stupidity matters:

You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess….

The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

….I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.

Does this mean Trump will not listen to anyone? No it does not. But he is listening to the Laura Loomers of the world far more than the Scott Bessents.

Media rumors are now percolating that Bessent wants out, “because in the last few days he’s really hurting his own credibility and history in the markets.” The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World disagrees: Bessent hurt his own credibility by believing, against all evidence to the contrary, that he would have been able to guide Trump towards less counterproductive policy positions. This further confirms something that Drezner’s World has been articulating for quite some time: Wall Street types do not understand politics and can rationalize with the best of them.

For those readers not on Wall Street, let me summarize the current state of affairs as best as possible. Donald Trump is president. There are no adults in the room to constrain him. We therefore live in uncertain times that will remain uncertain for an extended period of time.