{"id":305469,"date":"2025-10-20T12:01:21","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T11:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=305469"},"modified":"2025-10-19T07:48:38","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T06:48:38","slug":"a-critique-of-pure-stupidity-understanding-trump-2-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/10\/a-critique-of-pure-stupidity-understanding-trump-2-0\/","title":{"rendered":"A Critique of Pure Stupidity: Understanding Trump 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>

Donald Trump<\/p><\/div>\n

If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2 Oct 2025\u00a0<\/em>– The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a\u00a0campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared \u201cpost-truth\u201d their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster\u2019s was \u201csurreal\u201d. The scourge of \u201cfake news\u201d, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. And\u00a0when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase \u201calternative facts\u201d a few days after Trump\u2019s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of\u00a0the incoming administration appeared to be all but\u00a0official.<\/p>\n

The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of\u00a0emboldening those it sought to oppose. \u201cFake\u201d was one of Trump\u2019s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president\u2019s lies and denials. The\u00a0tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951\u00a0book The\u00a0Origins of Totalitarianism that \u201cthe ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the\u00a0dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction \u2026 no\u00a0longer\u00a0exists\u201d.<\/p>\n

In 2025, the denunciations have a different flavour. To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies as one of stupidity. This\u00a0diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum. In January, the centrist columnist David\u00a0Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled \u201cThe Six Principles of Stupidity\u201d. The new administration, he wrote, was \u201cbehaving in a way that\u00a0ignores the question: What would happen next?\u201d<\/p>\n

In March, Hillary Clinton \u2013 not, perhaps, ideal counsel \u2013 weighed in with an op-ed in the same paper, with the headline: \u201cHow Much Dumber Will This Get?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not the hypocrisy that bothers me,\u201d Clinton wrote, \u201cit\u2019s the stupidity.\u201d And in April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour posted an essay on \u201cStupidity as Historical Force\u201d. In\u00a0place of Arendt, Seymour quoted Trotsky: \u201cWhen the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking\u201d \u2013 once the forces of reaction predominate, so reason gives way to insults and prejudice.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s lying is no less constant or blatant than in\u00a02016, but by now it feels familiar, already priced in. What more is there to say about the \u201cwar on truth\u201d a\u00a0decade into Trump\u2019s political career?<\/p>\n

Still, at least two aspects of his second administration are newly and undoubtedly \u201cstupid\u201d. One is shambolic incompetence of a degree that led the editor of the Atlantic magazine to be accidentally added to a Signal group chat<\/a> about US military operations, a group whose other members included the vice-president and the secretary of defence. A\u00a0second is its incomprehensible determination to press ahead with policies \u2013 such as tariffs and the defunding of medical research \u2013 that will do deep harm without any apparent gain, even for Trump\u2019s backers and clients, still less his voters.<\/p>\n

The spectacle of a prominent vaccine sceptic and wellness crank as secretary of health and human services goes beyond an abandonment of truth; it feels like an assault on human progress. Bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah<\/a> and Florida at Robert F Kennedy Jr\u2019s behest, mark a new hostility to the very idea of evidence-based government. The escalation from Trump One to Trump Two has seen irrationality spread from the deliberative public sphere to flood the veins of government.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>hen we interpret the actions of others, a basic principle is to assume that people have reasons for behaving as they do, even if those reasons may be emotional, shortsighted or cynical. In the wake of the group chat fiasco and the tariffs upheaval, social media posters made a kind of parlour game of cramming the Trump administration\u2019s actions into their favoured explanatory paradigm. Signalgate must have been deliberate; tariffs must be a grand plan to crash the dollar in the interest of one economic faction or another. The risk is that ever-more elaborate explanations for stupid actions end up wrongly according those actions a kind of intelligence \u2013 rather\u00a0confirming the insight of the political scientist Robyn\u00a0Marasco that \u201cconspiracy theory is a love affair with power that poses as its critique\u201d.<\/p>\n

Such speculations are often met with a retort that leans even harder into the stupidity allegation. No, Trump and his people are not playing four-dimensional chess, the response goes \u2013 we are simply witnessing the consequences of allowing a deranged man into the highest office, backed by a coterie of dim and unqualified cronies. When political sociology falls short, medical psychiatry and an unspoken social Darwinism fill the void.<\/p>\n

Not for the first time, the early months of the second Trump administration drew comparisons to Mike Judge\u2019s 2006 movie Idiocracy, in which a\u00a0soldier of average intelligence wakes up 500 years into the future to discover a US governed by idiocy. Culturally, technologically and ecologically, the depiction feels grimly prophetic. Waste and pollution are out of control. The president is a TV celebrity with the manner and style of a pro-wrestling star. Doctors have been replaced by clunky diagnostic machines. Consumers sit in front of screens flooded with ads and slogans that they repeat like memes. When the soldier advises people to stop trying to irrigate their failing crops using a Gatorade-like drink and to use water instead, they swiftly abandon this practical suggestion when the drink manufacturer\u2019s profits collapse. \u201cDo\u00a0you really want to live in a world where you\u2019re trying to blow up the one person who is trying to help you?\u201d the soldier asks in desperation, after people turn on him. And, yes, it turns out they do.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, at the White House, February 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Leah Millis\/Reuters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We might recognise stupefying consumerism and profit maximisation as symptoms of our own age of idiocy, but the premise of Judge\u2019s satire is a politically ugly one. The reason the US has descended into this abyss over the centuries is that smart people (depicted as neurotic professionals) have stopped reproducing, while dumb people (depicted as violent trailer-park trash) can\u2019t stop, eventually overwhelming the gene pool with stupidity. At a time when racial eugenics, natalist policy and IQ fixation are ascendant once more, this is scarcely a line of thinking that many liberals or leftists can endorse. Then again, who can be sure that opponents of reactionary \u201cstupidity\u201d don\u2019t sometimes harbour eugenicist fantasies of their own? The aftermath of the Brexit vote \u2013 like tariffs, a seemingly senseless act of economic self-harm \u2013 witnessed liberal mutterings that typical leave voters were so elderly that by the time Brexit finally came into effect, many had already died.<\/p>\n

One needn\u2019t indulge in such dark fantasies to hope that official stupidity eventually meets its comeuppance. Surely stupid economic policies must lead to stupid political strategy, resulting in the loss of power. Again, Britain\u2019s recent experience offers a precedent: when the then prime minister, Liz Truss, put her own fiscal dogmas above the judgments of the bond markets in September 2022, she was swiftly ejected from office (with the help of the Bank of England) a mere 49 days after entering it. With Trump, many have looked to the bond markets as the final backstop of intelligence in a stupid world, the power that eventually forces idiots to confront consequences. This works up to a point, especially when financial pain is visited upon corporate executives who have the president\u2019s ear \u2013 but it only trims away at the stupidity, warding off its worst excesses. Trump\u2019s lack of basic causal understanding, of how policy A leads to outcome B, is not limited to economic policy, nor to\u00a0Trump himself.<\/p>\n

The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a\u00a0wholly mental or psychiatric phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as Andr\u00e9 Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become \u201cfunctional\u201d, a\u00a0feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences.<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organisational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things \u2013 universities, public health, market data \u2013 that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn\u2019t an emergent side-effect of smart people\u2019s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced. This needs to be confronted politically and sociologically, without falling into the opposite trap of \u201csanewashing\u201d or inflating strategic cunning to\u00a0the\u00a0point of conspiracy theory.<\/p>\n

\u201cS<\/span>ince the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense,\u201d wrote Arendt in 1953. \u201cIn many respects, this has appeared simply as an increasing stupidity … Stupidity in the Kantian sense has become the infirmity of everybody, and therefore can\u00a0no longer be regarded as \u2018beyond Remedy\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arendt\u2019s argument contained a glimmer of hope. Stupidity on a social scale had to be remediable, if only because it was no longer explicable as a mere cognitive deficiency among individuals. She believed that people \u2013 intellectuals as much as \u201cthe masses\u201d \u2013 had stopped exercising their powers of judgment, preferring to mouth platitudes or simply obey orders, rather than think for themselves. But what are the social and political conditions that normalise this? One\u00a0is a society where people wait for instruction on\u00a0how to think, which Arendt saw as\u00a0a\u00a0key\u00a0characteristic of totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

This social model of stupidity \u2013 crystallised in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey \u2013 has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of\u00a0data collection and analysis.<\/p>\n

Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society\u2019s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The \u201cstupid\u201d person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the \u201csmart\u201d person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes.<\/p>\n

In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for \u201cbig\u00a0data\u201d by Silicon Valley ideologue and former Wired editor Chris Anderson, and for randomised control trials by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Abhijit Banerjee: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings \u2013 with all their biases and errors \u2013 redundant. Once everything is\u00a0quantified, right down to nanodetails, not\u00a0even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition. You don\u2019t need a concept of \u201crabbit\u201d to identify the furry thing with big ears; you just design machines to identify which word most commonly appears alongside such an image.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Elon Musk speaks during a news conference, May 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thus when people look to the bond markets to rescue us from stupidity, they are not expecting the return of \u201ccommon sense\u201d, but merely that certain behaviours and policies will receive lower scores than others. Similarly, large language models, which promise so much today, do not offer judgment, let alone intelligence, but unrivalled pattern-processing power, based on a vast corpus\u00a0of\u00a0precedents. (Large language models such as ChatGPT are intelligent within their own limits, but comically stupid when stretched beyond them. Google\u2019s AI-generated search feature has been asked to explain the meaning of nonsensical made-up idioms \u2013 such as \u201cyou can\u2019t lick a badger twice\u201d and \u201cerase twice, plank once\u201d \u2013 which it confidently proceeded to do, producing torrents of bullshit. Professors will also be familiar with the experience of reading student essays that are neither very good nor very bad, but that uncanny combination of the intelligent and the stupid that is the mark of AI writing.)<\/p>\n

From the neoliberal critique of planning in the 1970s to Elon Musk\u2019s Doge, political attacks on governmental and professional forms of human authority serve the parallel project of opening space for overarching technologies of quantification, comparison and evaluation. Yet the technological quest to \u201cgo meta\u201d on the rest of society, thus reducing the role of human judgment, is not new. In The Human Condition, Arendt identified the launch of Sputnik in 1957 as a historical turning point, offering the possibility of an unworldly perspective on worldly affairs, downgrading the latter in the process. The cold war, which gave birth to the internet and myriad tools of control and surveillance, was a battle to achieve the most complete global\u00a0viewpoint. No behaviour or movement was deemed irrelevant to uncovering the enemy\u2019s intentions. Musk\u2019s fixation on space (Starlink now has about 8,000 satellites in orbit) is of a piece with his flippant approach to human judgment. Pressed on why he falsely claimed, as a pretext for slashing its budget, that USAID spent $50m on condoms for Gaza, Musk casually responded: \u201cSome of the things I say will be\u00a0incorrect.\u201d<\/p>\n

The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators. One morning in April, the\u00a0S&P 500 jumped 6% after a viral rumour that Trump\u2019s tariff policy was being paused \u2013 a rumour the Financial Times traced back to a pseudonymous X user named Walter Bloomberg, based in Switzerland, with no offline credentials whatsoever. A Hayekian might point out that the error was quickly corrected \u2013 the market dropped 6% again within the hour \u2013 but\u00a0this was a manifestly stupid turn of events.<\/p>\n

In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics<\/a> comes from political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in\u00a0their analysis of the \u201cnew conspiracism\u201d.<\/p>\n

Classic conspiracy theory (regarding, say, the JFK assassination) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies and alliances. Its demands for coherence and meaning are excessive, while its tolerance for contingency is stunted. By contrast, \u201cThe new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we\u00a0have innuendo and verbal gesture \u2026 not evidence but repetition \u2026 The new conspiracism \u2013 all accusation, no evidence \u2013 substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are\u00a0saying it, to use Trump\u2019s signature phrase, then it is\u00a0true\u00a0enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and \u201cconspiracy entrepreneurs\u201d. Outlandish and pointless fantasies, such as the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don\u2019t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared and repeated. Engagement \u2013 and revenue \u2013 is all.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Robert F Kennedy Jr speaks at the White House, September 2025.<\/span> Photograph: ABACA\/Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This analysis takes us beyond the 2016-era panic over \u201ctruth\u201d to help us chart the current political flood waters of \u201cstupidity\u201d. When Republican politicians go on TV and make absurd claims about tariffs, vaccines or immigration, is it best understood as \u201clying\u201d, or as something else altogether? Often they are simply repeating lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes \u2013 Trump and RFK Jr especially \u2013 in the conspiracist network. Some claims act as loyalty oaths (affirmations that the 2020 election was stolen), but more are just deranged and bizarre, not to mention sick, such as the claim that DEI hiring policies were responsible for the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January, and the fatal aircraft collision that killed 67 people that same month. Taken as judgments or explanations, they raise questions about the cognitive faculties of the speaker, but perhaps they are better seen as memes. The individuals might sound stupid, but they are not the architects of a media sphere in which causal explanation has been sacrificed for symbolic mimicry, to fill time and generate content.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>n the same essay reflecting on stupidity, Arendt distinguished between \u201cpreliminary\u201d and \u201ctrue\u201d understanding. Because it involves applying existing concepts to particular situations, preliminary understanding has a kind of circularity. It can be clever and correct, but it falls short when confronting the genuine novelty of human actions. One can escape the most brute form of stupidity, yet not truly understand the significance of the political and historical moment. Even the cleverest person or system can get trapped in\u00a0a \u201cpreliminary\u201d understanding of events.<\/p>\n

Arendt argued that there was a second human faculty, in addition to judgment, that allowed understanding to progress to a truer grasp of meaning: imagination. Imagination, for Arendt, is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative leaps, drawing on empathy and creativity in the process, as\u00a0opposed to scientific methods. Politics requires us to navigate situations which are incomparable and immeasurable, because they are genuinely new. This in\u00a0turn requires something closer to aesthetic judgment than to scientific judgment.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagination alone,\u201d Arendt wrote, \u201cenables us to see things in their proper perspective.\u201d The challenge Arendt poses to us is to think of truth and meaning not from the perspective of the economist, financial analyst, data scientist or sociologist, but of the historian, the kind who sees human events as a series of breaks, anomalies and initiations.<\/p>\n

This is what the \u201cclosed world\u201d of platform and market surveillance can\u2019t provide: a kind of understanding that is not reducible to empirical data. Artificial or market \u201cintelligence\u201d has the capacity to learn at ultra-high speed from existing data, but its range of possible outcomes, while extremely large, is nevertheless enumerable and therefore finite. In the gamified space of such \u201cclosed worlds\u201d, history is finished, and all that remains is lots and lots of behaviours. Every conceivable event, utterance or idea is already out there, whether in the real-time computer of the market or the archival one of the data bank, waiting to be discovered.<\/p>\n

Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don\u2019t know what they are doing, don\u2019t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human. The tariffs fiasco has been the greatest fillip to the legitimacy of the economics profession in living memory, showing by a\u00a0series of brute experimental results that international trade does, on balance, enhance prosperity and efficiency. It turns out that the foundational concepts of macroeconomics do have some empirical grip upon the world after all, and that to ignore them is an act of stupidity. Tragically, a\u00a0similar process is under way in public health.<\/p>\n

But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall the \u201cpreliminary understanding\u201d of expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism. The outsourcing of judgment to financial markets, digital platforms and fusions of the two is\u00a0also\u00a0an invitation for people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason. It would be absurd to seek hope in Trump and Trumpism, but perhaps stupidity on such a world-historical level can at least offer an opportunity for \u201ctrue\u201d understanding. Nothing \u2013 markets, bots or machines \u2013 can rescue us, except our\u00a0imagination.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

A longer version of this essay appeared in n+1 magazine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>William Davies is a sociologist and political economist. His latest book is Unprecedented? How Covid-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Oct 2025\u00a0– If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":139683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1778,260,249,70,71],"class_list":["post-305469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-conflict-analysis","tag-history","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305469"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305475,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305469\/revisions\/305475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}