The Best People Fallacy
I could be wrong, but in the nearly twelve years that Barack Obama and then Joe Biden have occupied the White House I cannot recall a single instance of either man taking to social media to insult a top-level appointee after their relationship went south and the appointee either quit in protest or was fired.
For that matter I can’t recall Obama or Biden ever publicly insulting people they gave some of the most important jobs in our government, on social media or elsewhere.
That’s because Obama and Biden are grown-ups and professionals rather than messy little bitches who love drama. Mature adults don’t lob schoolyard insults at people who have worked for them, particularly when they themselves gave them the jobs they later decided they were so bad at.
They don’t do that because it’s obnoxious and unprofessional but also because doing so would reflect poorly on them as well. It would make them seem like thin-skinned, immature, rage-prone assholes who can’t handle criticism but it would also suggest that they are awful at choosing employees, which is one of the most important aspects of any presidency.
The same cannot be said of Donald Trump. That’s because Trump is not a grown-up but rather a man-child engaged in the world’s longest, most public temper tantrum.
Trump most assuredly has taken to social media to insult seemingly half of the people he’s given crucial jobs high up in the administration. But Trump has also insulted people he hired at rallies and in press appearances.
In reality show tradition, Donald Trump did not become president to make friends, with the members of his own party or his own administration. Trump is not constrained by the rules of propriety. This is seen less as a flaw than a feature of Trump’s leadership style by his army of cultists. They see him as a bold, blunt, unafraid truth teller rather than a deranged baby who somehow became the most powerful person in the world for four awful years.
I am perpetually amazed by the cognitive dissonance of Trump fans who think that he did an amazing job as president even though, by his own admission, he continually hired people he later deemed stupid and weak and incompetent for minor positions like, I dunno, Secretary of State, Chief Strategist, Communications Director, Chair of the Federal Reserve, Attorney General, National Security Adviser and Chief of Staff.
If Trump has such wonderful judgment, then why does he hate many of the people he previously thought highly enough to appoint to his cabinet?
I suspect that people who respect, trust and like Trump have convinced themselves that it’s actually a positive that the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president has gone to war with so many of his former allies.
In their mind it speaks to Trump’s brilliance and strength of character that his administration was full of Deep State traitors who tried to sabotage his presidency from within yet he managed to overcome these turncoats and become the best Commander in Chief all the same.
For them, it speaks to Trump’s honesty that he’s so eager to insult, in deeply personal ways, people he once considered qualified for high office and to his strength of character that he was able to overcome having so many employees who turned out to be wildly incompetent.
If you accepted a position with the first Trump administration it seemed like there was at least a twenty percent chance that you’d quit or be fired, at which point the most powerful person in the world, and a recent employer, would try to convince society that you’re lazy and corrupt and stupid and ugly and that he only gave you a job because he felt sorry for you because you’re so pathetic.
If Trump is elected to a second term, which is a terrifying possibility given the state the world is in right now, he won’t make the mistake of hiring qualified veterans who might stand up to him. He knows all too well that five star generals aren’t impressed by him and will not be fawning and deferential towards someone they rightly consider an incompetent idiot and a poster boy for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Instead Trump will appointee people whose only real qualification is that they are relentlessly loyal to him and will do everything he wants, instead of only doing his bidding only 99.99999999999 percent of the time, like Mike Pence, who earned the president’s enduring hatred by not personally handing Trump the presidency just because he lost.
I hope you’re prepared for Secretary of State Marjorie Taylor Greene and Secretary of Education Lauren Boebert because that’s what we’ll be getting in Trump’s second term.
Then again Trump has a habit of bitterly falling out with even his most loyal compatriots so don’t expect the insults to stop at any point or for cultists who have happily drunk the Kool-Aid and asked for more to see Trump’s habit of publicly degrading former employees as anything other than proof of his awesomeness.
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