Trumpism is kakistocracy

A cult of personality prizes loyalty above competence, resulting in "rule by the worst".

Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One particularly noteworthy thing about Donald Trump is how almost all of the people who work for him seem to end up hating him. When Trump was in office the first time, he hired a bunch of military and ex-military men (despite being a draft dodger himself). Almost all of these men ended up despising him. Here’s a handy infographic:

Source: Republicans Against Trump

(This infographic omits the jobs that these folks did when they worked for Trump; for example, John Kelly was Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, James Mattis and Mark Esper were each Secretary of Defense, H.R. McMaster was Trump’s National Security Advisor, etc.)

Here’s another infographic with some quotes that include more than just military men:

Source: @TheDemCoalition

That’s pretty unusual! I can’t think of another public figure in modern America who was so hated by their ex-employees. Can you?

So how do we explain this near-universal rejection of Trump by the people who worked with him most closely? I guess one explanation is that they’ve all been infected with the dreaded Woke Mind Virus. But it’s unclear why working for Donald Trump would cause almost everyone to be exposed to the Woke Mind Virus, when working for, say, JD Vance, or Ron DeSantis, or any other prominent right-wing figure does not seem to produce such an infection.

Of course, not everyone who worked for Trump has abandoned and denounced him. Rudy Giuliani, who is now under indictment in several different states, is still among the faithful. Michael Flynn, who was fired by Obama for insubordination and then removed by Trump for improper personal dealings with the Russian government, is still on board, and is now threatening to unleash the “gates of Hell” on Trump’s political enemies. Peter Navarro, the economist¹ who served four months in prison for defying a Congressional subpoena, is still a Trump fan. And so on.

You may perhaps notice a pattern among the relatively few people who are still on board the Trump Train from his first term. They are all very shady people. I don’t think this is a coincidence; I think it’s something systematic about Donald Trump’s personality and his method of rule.

As many people have noted, Trump’s movement is a cult of personality. Since Trump took over the Republican party in 2016, essentially every tenet of modern conservatism has been replaced with belief in a single leader. Trump appointed the judges that killed Roe v. Wade, but he constantly goes back and forth on the topic of abortion rights. Trump didn’t cut entitlement spending, but whether he wants to do that in his second term or not depends on which day you ask him. Trump has flip-flopped on the TikTok bill, on marijuana legalization, on the filibuster, on SALT caps, and so on.

But these flip-flops do not matter to his support at all. His supporters are sure that whichever decision Trump makes, it will be the right one, and if he changes it the following week, that will be the right decision as well. If tomorrow Trump declared that tariffs are terrible and illegal immigration is great, this would immediately become the essence of Trumpism. Trump’s followers put their trust not in principled ideas, but in a man — or, to be more accurate, in the idea of a man. That is what Trumpism requires of its adherents.

This means that anyone with strong principles is likely to eventually be kicked out of Trump’s orbit. Having principles means adhering to an idea instead of to a man, which violates the first and only rule of Trumpism.

This can result in some spectacularly bad personnel decisions. For example, if Trump wins next week’s elections, noted kook RFK Jr. is now slated to have a major role in his administration, overseeing health and food safety:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is poised to have significant control over health and food safety in a potential Trump administration, with discussions about some Cabinet and agency officials reporting to him, according to four people familiar with the planning process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations…

“The president has asked me to clean up corruption and conflicts at the agencies and to end the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said in an interview Wednesday. “He wants measurable results in two years and to return those agencies to their long traditions of gold-standard evidence-based science and medicine.”

RFK Jr.’s most notable position on health is his belief that vaccines — not just Covid vaccines, but all vaccines — are harmful. In fact, opposition to vaccination now pervades the Trump team:

CNN’s Kaitlin Collins interviewed Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick…Lutnick proceeded to reveal that he had spoken with Kennedy for more than two hours…In the interview, Lutnick calmly repeated a series of vaccine-skeptic talking points. He did not even limit his vaccine skepticism to the COVID-19 vaccine, which is safe and effective, but to all vaccines, which he painted as unregulated, dangerous, and part of a for-profit conspiracy between the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government. The steps he proposed would be to give Kennedy data about vaccines, and if Kennedy decides they are not safe, which he already has, the FDA could pull approval.

Lutnick apparently also endorsed the long-debunked idea that vaccines cause autism.²

This is kakistocracy. Kakistocracy is an old word meaning “a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.” It is most commonly invoked to describe governments in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a word I used a lot during Trump’s first term, and which I expect to use again if he wins a second one.

The reason Trump’s government ejects people like James Mattis and John Kelly, and elevates people like RFK Jr. and Peter Navarro, is simply the cult of personality. The kind of people who display unwavering loyalty in defiance of all principle are unlikely to be particularly competent or ethical people — after all, pride in one’s work and adherence to ethical codes are both ideals that could potentially countermand the will of the leader.

There is, of course, Elon Musk, who is nothing if not hyper-competent. Regardless of whether Elon decides to set aside his principles, I predict that Trump will marginalize Elon out of fear of being overshadowed. There’s already a hint of this — Lutnick, Trump’s transition team co-chair, apparently said in his recent interview that “tech entrepreneur Elon Musk would ‘help’ rather than serve in the government if Trump wins.” Principles aren’t the only threat to a cult of personality; another big, popular personality is also a threat.

The next question is: Why? Surely voters can see that Trumpism creates kakistocracy. Why is his support still robust?

The most commonly cited theory is that Trump “owns the libs” — that Republican voters prioritize the culture wars over everything else, and that they love Trump because he makes progressives angrier than anyone else does. I’m sure this theory has some validity to it, but I suspect there’s something deeper going on, and that it has to do with education polarization.

Over the past decade and a half, education has come to be one of the most reliable predictors of voting behavior. The partisan gap between those with the most education and those with the least is bigger than the gender gap, the age gap, or the White/Hispanic race gap:

Source: Pew

This gap grew especially big starting in 2016, when Trump appeared on the scene:

Source: The Economist

One explanation is that Trump’s ideas and behavior repelled educated people, while his realty-TV-type style and demeanor appealed to the less-educated. Another interpretation, however, is that college-educated Americans had already been trending in a more progressive direction for years, as evidenced by the general upward drift of the dark blue line in the chart above. The shift is even more pronounced at the higher end of the scale — Americans with postgraduate degrees have been trending leftward since at least the mid-1990s:

Source: Pew

Education polarization has done a couple of important and disquieting things to the conservative movement and the Republican party. First, it has shrunk the pool of educated conservatives from which GOP administrations can draw their appointees. Matt Yglesias pointed this out in an excellent post back in August:

The crank realignment is bad for everyone

In addition, as Yglesias also notes, education polarization has resulted in the domination of many American institutions by progressives. These include universities, the media, nonprofits, government agencies, and many businesses, all of which rely heavily on education to select their membership.

This is naturally very frustrating for conservatives. And I think for some, it creates a desire to kick out forcefully against those institutions. For example, conservatives have come to distrust almost all mainstream media sources:

Source: Pew

In recent years, conservatives have lost trust in the scientific establishment as well:

Source: University of Chicago

Education polarization is not the only reason for Americans’ falling trust in their institutions, but it’s probably part of the story.

I’m not going to tell conservatives that their mistrust is entirely unfounded. I can certainly think of times when progressive politics has eroded the credibility of important elite institutions in America, especially in the last few years. Public health officials’ call to ignore the dangers of Covid during the Floyd protests, on the grounds that “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue”, comes to mind. A rash of sloppy or even fabricated results in social science in recent years has been defended on progressive ideological grounds. Calls in Nature and other top scientific journals for “weaving indigenous knowledge into the scientific method” are not exactly confidence-inspiring.

That’s all quite bad, in my opinion, and I think pushback against this stuff has been growing among centrists and normie liberals during the Biden years. But kakistocracy is not a solution to the problem. For one thing, An advanced country needs functioning public institutions. Smashing those institutions’ power by appointing antivaxxers and other cranks will simply result in a lot of sick American children, and many other negative consequences.

But on top of that, appointing antivax cranks is not going to make the medical establishment less likely to embrace woke pseudoscience; on the contrary, it will give ideologues within the medical establishment cover to seize even more dominance within their fields. When the public’s choice is between A) their kids getting measles, and B) tolerating more guff about “indigenous knowledge” in Nature magazine, people will end up choosing the latter.

There are actually ways for conservatives to rebuild their influence in American institutions without destroying those institutions. The most obvious is cartelization — consider the Federalist Society, which has succeeded in getting plenty of conservative judges into the judiciary, including a majority of the Supreme Court, simply by having conservatives support each other. The same could be done in academia and government as well. Whatever your opinion of the Federalist society and conservative jurisprudence, they have not destroyed competence.

But those efforts exist at the elite level; the average voter has no idea what the Federalist Society even is. A lot of GOP voters see progressives taking over the commanding heights of American institutions, and probably wants to react by whacking those institutions with whatever tools are available. If that tool is a personality cult centered around a man with a terrible personality, then so be it. If that tool is a bunch of cranks and kooks who want to send your kid to school with kids infected with measles, then so be it.

That’s a terrible way to run a country. Eventually, countries that run themselves that way stop being great entirely — there is only so much kakistocracy we can endure.

Update: Speaking of kakistocracy, I saw the following headline right after I published this post:

When I say Trump attracts the worst people, I really mean the worst.

---

1. I use the term loosely, given Navarro’s lack of understanding of basic economics.

2. Note that this is yet another Trump flip-flop; Trump long touted the efficacy of Covid vaccines, because of his own role in accelerating the development of those vaccines during the pandemic. Interestingly, this is a case in which Trump’s ideas followed those of his supporters instead of vice-versa. Had he remained in power after 2020, it seems unlikely his movement would have turned against the Trump Vaccine.