I haven’t written anything political on this blog for a long time, but the recent train wrecks in the Trump administration (or should I say the increased frequency of train wrecks) make me feel like our country is in some kind of surreal situation, with a leader who is basically an arrogant, ignorant, petulant child.
In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, I read that Trump suffers from something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is “the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence.” He demonstrates this over and over, most recently by revealing classified intelligence he essentially didn’t understand.
The Times article ends with this gem, which sums up much of what I feel about our President:
“We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand?
Sigh.