No. of Recommendations: 1
But I do have to question if people who aren't "book smart" but are "people smart" make the best people to be making decisions about public policy.Best people? Absolutely not. One of the important traits of an effective politician - especially the President - is the capacity to absorb an awful lot of information about things in a very efficient way.
Most Presidents want to get information about the situation that they have to make a decision about, so they can match their decision to the state of the world/situation that it applies to.
Trump doesn't do that. He probably can't do that. He doesn't
want to do that, because he doesn't necessarily view the job of President the way that most of his predecessors has. I'll quote Yuval Levin on this.
Well, I agree with that, but I think it feeds into a fundamental difference about the understanding of the president’s role. Where, again, a lot of recent White Houses have thought of the president’s role as making difficult decisions, the Trump White House sees it as advancing tough change. And those are different ways of thinking.https://archive.ph/XrD95#selection-1753.0-1753.334IOW, DJT's approach to the Presidency is that of a CEO. He views the job as trying to effectuate a change in the government, in the country, in the world to match those things to what he was elected to do. If that's your view of the job, information really only needs to flow one way -
from the President
to the people carrying out his policies. He knows what he wants to do, and he views the role of his Presidency as making those things happen. He's
not in the business of making new choices, but implementing choices that have already been made.
Again, I don't think that's a
good approach to governance. But that's very different from him necessarily being an idiot.
