Everything that came before President Donald Trump is dumb, he thinks, according to journalist and author Fred Kaplan.
In a recent piece for The iPaper, Kaplan called out Trump’s aversion to pre-history.
“The modern presidents before him were stupid (his vice president, JD Vance, quipped at the start of the bombing raid on Iran that the predecessors got stuck in Middle East wars because, unlike Trump, they were ‘dumb’) and expertise is a myth,” wrote Kaplan.
He cited a few of Trump’s statements on the matter, claiming “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” “Nobody knows more about trade than me,” “I know more about drones than anybody” and “My primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct about this stuff.”
It has changed his second term from relying on experts to expelling them. For Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it means that many top military leaders who have dedicated their lives to service aren’t being promoted. Secretary of State Marco Rubio fired 1,350 officials around the world. Trump still hasn’t managed to get ambassadors to more than 100 embassies.
Trump’s cuts have come closer to home, said Kaplan, with inexperienced national security staff now at the helm, cutting crucial jobs. Typically, the National Security Council staff writes position papers with other agency staff to take a whole-of-government approach on the matter.
“In most administrations, especially since the 1960s, this really is how national security policy is made. Sometimes it prolongs the process, to the frustration of some, but often, the complexity of the issues requires time and trouble,” Kaplan explained. “Trump’s White House does none of this. He has cut the NSC staff by half and told the survivors that their task is not to bring him analysis or advice but rather to implement what he has decided to do. And when it comes to making foreign policy, there isn’t a Trump Administration in the usual sense of the term; there’s Trump and a handful of his cronies who parrot whatever he says – if they want to keep their jobs.”
While the National Security Advisor is a full-time position, Rubio is serving in the role in addition to his own post as secretary of state. His deputy has no experience in national security, but he was the chief of staff to the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation.
Kaplan noted that when Trump was making his decisions on Iran, the experts weren’t brought together to discuss scenarios, optics or even options. It was the inner circle of people who was with him, wrote Maggie Habermann and Jonathan Swan in their new book Regime Change.
“Trump presented a highly optimistic scenario based on assurances by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had tried to persuade the previous three presidents to attack Iran,” Kaplan wrote. “Trump said Netanyahu’s plan sounded good to him. End of discussion.”
Now, after appointing an inexperienced acting director of national intelligence whose job was to “clean house,” the stability of the U.S. national security apparatus is in question.
“It’s a good question whether a future president can rebuild the institutions and guardrails that might have impeded such a mindless epochal calamity,” Kaplan closed. “But we can hope that successors learn at least one lesson from Trump’s repeated disasters – that those institutions and guardrails were put in place for a reason, and as much as the world has changed since then, the reason is still valid.”