One occasionally hears the phrase "the best and the brightest" used without intentional irony to describe people as highly qualified experts and thus likely to do an excellent job in some demanding positions. The phrase nonetheless carries a negative connotation ever since David Halberstam's book of that name, chronicling how the Kennedy and then Johnson administrations blundered into, and continued to blunder once embroiled in, the Vietnam war.
In standard cocktail-party settings, Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest is often cited (frequently by people who haven't actually read it) for the proposition that expertise is no guarantee of practical competence. Although that proposition is true, it isn't actually the point of the book. Halberstam offered plenty of evidence that the decision makers--especially Robert McNamara--were of course smart and well educated but that they in fact lacked relevant expertise and largely ignored the reports and warnings of people who did have local knowledge.
Even so, let us take at face value the proposition that even genuine experts can err, for certainly that is true. It nonetheless does not follow that, ex ante, one does better to trust the reins to spiteful ignoramuses whose only qualification for leadership is their willingness to debase themselves as sycophantic courtiers to an emperor-fool. The race isn't always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. Thus, there is a decent chance that the emerging clown car of a second Trump administration will drive over a cliff.
I'll have more to say about Trump's courtiers in follow-up essays next week. For today, I'll confine myself to expressing surprise about how much surprise has greeted the announcements of the last few days.
Each of the most absurd Trump picks for important Cabinet positions has been greeted with an outcry. Anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services? Preposterous! At-best-ethically-challenged Matt Gaetz for Attorney General? Unthinkable! Possibly white supremacist (and generally unqualified) tv personality Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary? Outrageous! Putin apologist (and all-around crazy person) Tulsi Gabbard for National Intelligence Director? Appalling!
The exclamations are all objectively appropriate. But the surprise that seemingly permeates the reactions is itself, well, surprising. After all, the casting director who chose this gang is Donald Trump--a man who wasn't remotely qualified to the presidency the first time around; whose first presidential term featured racism, xenophobia, chaos, corruption, and a bungled pandemic response that led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; who encouraged a violent mob to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after the failure of his comical legal efforts to prevent it; and who campaigned for election this time around by embracing authoritarianism, spreading dehumanizing lies about immigrants, "dancing" rather than take questions, expressing admiration for the size of Arnold Palmer's penis, and promising to combat inflation--which has already cooled to lower than its long-term average--by mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (who comprise a good portion of the agricultural and construction workforce) and imposing heavy across-the-board tariffs, i.e., by adopting inflationary policies.
Yes, it is preposterous, unthinkable, outrageous, and appalling that Trump hopes to staff his administration with RFK Jr., Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard. But is it more preposterous, unthinkable, outrageous, and appalling than the fact that Donald J. Trump is about to be president again?
It's sensible to be dismayed when you learn that Caligula wants to make his horse Incitatus a Consul, but is it really surprising? Incitatus is hardly your biggest problem when Caligula himself is Emperor.
