Two
weeks after President Trump claimed, bizarrely, that the Obama
administration had wiretapped his campaign, his press secretary
suggested that GCHQ — Britain’s counterpart to the National Security
Agency — had done the imaginary bugging. British officials were
outraged. And soon the British press was reporting that the Trump
administration had apologized.
But
no: Meeting with the chancellor of Germany, another ally he’s
alienating, Mr. Trump insisted that there was nothing to apologize for.
He said, “All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind,” a commentator on (of course) Fox News.
Was
anyone surprised? This administration operates under the doctrine of
Trumpal infallibility: Nothing the president says is wrong, whether it’s
his false claim that he won the popular vote or his assertion that the
historically low murder rate is at a record high. No error is ever admitted. And there is never anything to apologize for.
O.K.,
at this point it’s not news that the commander in chief of the world’s
most powerful military is a man you wouldn’t trust to park your car or
feed your cat. Thanks, Comey. But Mr. Trump’s pathological inability to
accept responsibility is just the culmination of a trend. American
politics — at least on one side of the aisle — is suffering from an
epidemic of infallibility, of powerful people who never, ever admit to
making a mistake.
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Continue reading the main story
More than a decade ago I wrote that the Bush administration was suffering from a “mensch gap.”
(A mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his
actions.) Nobody in that administration ever seemed willing to accept
responsibility for policy failures, whether it was the bungled
occupation of Iraq or the botched response to Hurricane Katrina.
Later,
in the aftermath of the financial crisis, a similar inability to admit
error was on display among many economic commentators.
Take,
for example, the open letter a who’s who of conservatives sent to Ben
Bernanke in 2010, warning that his policies could lead to “currency
debasement and inflation.” They didn’t. But four years later, when
Bloomberg News contacted many of the letter’s signatories, not one was willing to admit having been wrong.
By the way, press reports say that one of those signatories, Kevin Hassett
— co-author of the 1999 book “Dow 36,000” — will be nominated as
chairman of Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Another, David
Malpass — the former chief economist at Bear Stearns, who declared on
the eve of the financial crisis that “the economy is sturdy” — has been nominated as undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs. They should fit right in.
Just
to be clear: Everyone makes mistakes. Some of these mistakes are in the
“nobody could have known” category. But there’s also the temptation to
engage in motivated reasoning, to let our emotions get the better of our
critical faculties — and almost everyone succumbs to that temptation
now and then (as I myself did on election night).
So
nobody is perfect. The point, however, is to try to do better — which
means owning up to your mistakes and learning from them. Yet that is
something that the people now ruling America never, ever do.
What happened to us? Some of it surely has to do with ideology: When you’re committed to a fundamentally false narrative
about government and the economy, as almost the whole Republican Party
now is, facing up to facts becomes an act of political disloyalty. By
contrast, members of the Obama administration, from the president on
down, were in general far more willing to accept responsibility than
their Bush-era predecessors.
But
what’s going on with Mr. Trump and his inner circle seems to have less
to do with ideology than with fragile egos. To admit having been wrong
about anything, they seem to imagine, would brand them as losers and
make them look small.
In
reality, of course, inability to engage in reflection and
self-criticism is the mark of a tiny, shriveled soul — but they’re not
big enough to see that.
But why did so many Americans vote for Mr. Trump, whose character flaws should have been obvious long before the election?
Catastrophic
media failure and F.B.I. malfeasance played crucial roles. But my sense
is that there’s also something going on in our society: Many Americans
no longer seem to understand what a leader is supposed to sound like,
mistaking bombast and belligerence for real toughness.
Why? Is it celebrity culture? Is it working-class despair, channeled into a desire for people who spout easy slogans?
The
truth is that I don’t know. But we can at least hope that watching Mr.
Trump in action will be a learning experience — not for him, because he
never learns anything, but for the body politic. And maybe, just maybe,
we’ll eventually put a responsible adult back in the White House.
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