Sunday, December 17, 2017

A Perilous Disdain For Knowledge

About a year ago, I wrote about a troubling trait of our president-elect, namely his disdain for the Presidential Daily Briefings.  This was attracting increasing attention at the time, as evidenced by this NPR piece

“On Fox News, Trump didn't address that question specifically, instead getting back to his reasons for not getting the daily intelligence briefing, known to the president and White House staff as the PDB.  ‘I don't have to be told - you know, I'm, like, a smart person," Trump said.  ‘I don't have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years. It could be eight years - but eight years. I don't need that.’”

A recently published Washington Post article shows how much this vital part of the presidential routine has been stripped of its importance: 

“U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump.  Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update - known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB - is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

“Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter.  In other cases, Trump’s main briefer - a veteran CIA analyst - adjusts the order of  his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.  ‘If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference - that takes the PDB off the rails,’ said a second former senior U.S. intelligence official.”

Robert Tracinski wrote in The Federalist way back in September 2015 about Trump’s performance during an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program:  
“But the Hewitt interview reveals something that’s worse than not knowing the names of major Mideast players. What’s worse is his insistence that he doesn’t need to know them. His immediate excuse for this is that ‘by the time we get to office, they’ll all be changed…. The names you just mentioned, they probably won’t even be there in six months or a year.’

“What this highlights is not just Trump’s ignorance of the Middle East.  It’s his contemptuous indifference to knowledge.  It’s the fact that he feels confident making a sweeping assertion about the Middle East - that all of the big players are likely to change in the next year and a half - without even knowing what an absurd assertion this is.

“The problem isn’t that Trump doesn’t know, it’s that he doesn’t care.

“He asserts that he will know ‘when it’s appropriate.’  And he offers us this doozy of blustering over-confidence: ‘first day in office, or before then, right at the day after the election, I’ll know more about it than you will ever know. That I can tell you.’

“You know when it is ‘appropriate’ to know basic information about the Middle East?  It’s appropriate to know it now, while we’re still deciding whether we want him as our president.” 

World leaders have already sized up our president, and are very aware of his lack of knowledge about world affairs and threats.  Worse still, they are beginning to realize that he doesn’t seem to care about this lack.  He tells the world that he is “a smart person”, capable of becoming an instant expert on any subject.  

As the Post article points out:
“The allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, which the president has denied categorically, also contribute to his resistance to endorse the intelligence, another senior White House official said.  Acknowledging Russian interference, Trump believes, would give ammunition to his critics.

“Still others close to Trump explain his aversion to the intelligence findings in more psychological terms.  The president, who burns with resentment over perceived disrespect from the Washington establishment, sees the Russia inquiry as a conspiracy to undermine his election accomplishment - ‘a witch hunt,’ as he often calls it.

“‘If you say ‘Russian interference,’ to him it’s all about him,” said a senior Republican strategist who has discussed the matter with Trump’s confidants.  ‘He judges everything as about him.’’

Another acknowledged threat is his lack of a basic understanding of economics. We will most likely see the passage of the tax cut bill before Christmas.  He believes in its underlying premise that the resulting increased growth of the economy will pay for it.  I heard him say this past Saturday that the GDP rate of growth could increase to as much as 6%!  This is debunked by economists on both sides of the political spectrum.  Ironically, one economist says that we would need to drastically increase immigration to compensate for the impending retirement of the Baby Boomers.  But, as he is fond of saying: “We’ll see what happens”.  (And shucks, if it doesn’t work, we can always go after entitlements, which, in my opinion, is looking like the GOP’s end game anyway.)

Michael Bloomberg recently offered up this scathing analysis:  
“Corporations are sitting on a record amount of cash reserves: nearly $2.3 trillion. That figure has been climbing steadily since the recession ended in 2009, and it's now double what it was in 2001. The reason CEOs aren't investing more of their liquid assets has little to do with the tax rate.

“CEOs aren't waiting on a tax cut to ‘jump-start the economy’ - a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company - or to hand out raises.  It's pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth, as Republicans have promised.  Had Congress actually listened to executives, or economists who study these issues carefully, it might have realized that.”

Our president clearly hasn’t listened either- he just wants a win.  And apparently he doesn’t want to hear much from the intelligence community, with their important input in the Presidential Daily Briefings.  He is convinced that all they want to do is invalidate his winning the presidency.

D. Norman

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