Trump and His Infallible Advisers
Beware
men who never admit having been wrong.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 4, 2020, 6:09 p.m. ET
“You have 15 people, and the 15 within
a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.”
We
have contained this, and the economy is “holding up nicely.”
It’s not nearly as serious as the common flu.
We’re
going to have 50,000 or 60,000 deaths, and that’s great.
OK, we may have more than 100,000 deaths, but we’re doing a great job
and should reopen the economy.
You
sometimes hear people say that Donald Trump and his minions minimized the
dangers of Covid-19, and that this misjudgment helps explain why their policy
response has been so disastrously inadequate. But this statement, while true,
misses crucial aspects of what’s going on.
For
Trump and company didn’t make a one-time mistake. They grossly minimized the
pandemic and its dangers every step of the way, week after week over a period
of months. And they’re still doing it.
Now,
everyone makes bad predictions; God knows I have. But when you keep getting things wrong, and
especially when you keep getting them wrong in the same direction, you’re
supposed to engage in some self-reflection — and learn from your mistakes. Why
was I wrong? Did I give in to motivated reasoning, believing what I wanted to
be true rather than following the logic and evidence?
To
engage in such self-reflection, however, you have to be willing to admit that
you were wrong in the first place.
We
all know that Trump himself is incapable of making such an admission. At a time
of crisis, America is led by a whiny, childlike man whose ego is too fragile to
let him concede ever having made any kind of error. And he has surrounded
himself with people who share his lack of character.
But
where do these people come from? What has struck me, as details of Trump’s
coronavirus debacle continue to emerge, is that he wasn’t getting bad advice
from obscure, fringe figures whose only claim to fame was their successful
sycophancy. On the contrary, the people telling him what he wanted to hear
were, by and large, pillars of the conservative establishment with long
pre-Trump careers.
On
Saturday The Washington Post reported that
in late March Trump was unhappy with epidemiological models suggesting a death
toll over 100,000 — which, by the way, now seems highly likely. So the White
House created its own team led by Kevin Hassett, whom The Post describes as “a
former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in
infectious diseases.” And this team produced an analysis Trump aides
interpreted as implying a much lower death toll.
What
The Post didn’t say was that aside from not having any background in
epidemiology, Hassett has an, um, interesting record as an economist.
He
first attracted widespread attention as co-author of a 1999 book claiming that
stocks were greatly undervalued, and that the Dow should be 36,000 (which would
be around 55,000 today, adjusting for inflation). It quickly became clear that
there were major conceptual errors in
that book; but Hassett never admitted error.
In
the mid-2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting
that only liberals believed that there was.
In
2010 Hassett was part of a group of conservative economists and pundits who
warned in an open letter that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to rescue the
economy would lead to currency debasement and
inflation. Four years later Bloomberg News tried to reach signatories
to ask why that inflation never materialized; not one was willing to admit
having been wrong.
Finally,
Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in
business investment; it didn’t, but he
insisted that it did.
You
might think that an economist would pay some professional penalty for this kind
of track record — not simply one of making bad predictions, which everyone
does, but of both being wrong at every important juncture and refusing to admit
or learn from mistakes.
But
no: Hassett remains, as I said, a pillar of the modern conservative
establishment, and Trump called on him to second-guess experts in epidemiology,
a field in which he has no background.
And
Hassett isn’t even uniquely bad. Unlike, say, Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to
put on the Federal Reserve Board, he does not, as far as I know, have a history
of simply getting basic numbers and facts wrong.
The
moral of this story, I’d argue, is that observers trying to understand
America’s lethally bad response to the coronavirus focus too much on Trump’s
personal flaws, and not enough on the character of the party he leads.
Yes,
Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who
tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain
for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from
experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.
Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are
especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a
culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual
degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is
leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.
