A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0

the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists: Hannah Arendt

NB: The author asks: 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? I think not, if the way out is conceived as a way out for America, whose polity is imploding before our eyes: Trump is merely doing to America what America did to the rest of the world. Were the military and CIA interventions in Vietnam or Iraq or Chile (to name just a few) any less stupid, becuase they were carried out by ostensibly sane establishments? So what if Kissinger and McNamara were clever and not stupid. What is the legacy of these intelligent and depraved men?

Even this article completely omits the genocide in Palestine and the atrocious imperialist interventions by the USA over the decades. It is difficult to imagine (and imagination plays a big role towards the end of this essay) a world in which had hundreds of thousands of Americans and Englishmen been slaughtered or maimed, such an article would have forgotten to mention them.

Let’s read another perceptive comment by him: The outsourcing of judgment to financial markets, digital platforms and fusions of the two is also an invitation for people to behave stupidly. This is true, but its not just ‘judgment’ which has been outsourced. The very ideas of conscience, decency and human dignity have been nullified. Racism and communalism have sequestered the minds of millions, including people in my part of the world – to the point where we couldn’t care less about the tragic fate of children and innocents whom we see as less than human. Its not just stupidity we are confronted with: its genocidal complicity. We have been absorbed into a gigantic machine of organised crime, mind control, and technically assisted mass murder. The faster this deathly machine implodes the better for humanity.

It’s stupid not to see this glaring fact. Wake up and look at yourselves in the mirror. DS

By William Davies

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 campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal”. The scourge of “fake news”, 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 when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.

The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of emboldening those it sought to oppose. “Fake” was one of Trump’s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president’s lies and denials. The tools 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 book The Origins of Totalitarianism that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists”.

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 diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum. In January, the centrist columnist David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity”. The new administration, he wrote, was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?”

In March, Hillary Clinton – not, perhaps, ideal counsel – weighed in with an op-ed in the same paper, with the headline: “How Much Dumber Will This Get?” “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me,” Clinton wrote, “it’s the stupidity.” And in April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour posted an essay on “Stupidity as Historical Force”. In place of Arendt, Seymour quoted Trotsky: “When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking” – once the forces of reaction predominate, so reason gives way to insults and prejudice.

Trump’s lying is no less constant or blatant than in 2016, but by now it feels familiar, already priced in. What more is there to say about the “war on truth” a decade into Trump’s political career?

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

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 and Florida at Robert F Kennedy Jr’s 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.

When 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’s 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 – rather confirming the insight of the political scientist Robyn Marasco that “conspiracy theory is a love affair with power that poses as its critique”.

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 – 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.

Not for the first time, the early months of the second Trump administration drew comparisons to Mike Judge’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, in which a soldier 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’s profits collapse. “Do you really want to live in a world where you’re trying to blow up the one person who is trying to help you?” the soldier asks in desperation, after people turn on him. And, yes, it turns out they do….

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oct/02/critique-pure-stupidity-understanding-donald-trump-2

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