The Most Frightening Fact About Trump

He is incompetent in every way that matters. And that may be irrelevant.

Those of you who follow me on Substack’s Notes will know that I am not Donald Trump’s biggest fan (he said with magnificent understatement.) But what scares me most about Trump isn’t anything Trump says or does.

What scares me most about Trump is what I think is the most under-appreciated force in human history: coincidence.

Let me explain by repeating, verbatim, something written by the political scientist Larry Bartels. I read it many years ago and it has reverberated in my skull ever since.

In the passage, Bartels examines Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s defeat of the incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover in 1932, in the darkest days of the Great Depression, and his re-election in 1936, when the economy appeared to be on the mend. It wasn’t. A year later, it slumped again. But Roosevelt’s re-election cemented the New Deal in politics and governance — which shaped America for much of the rest of the century.

Bartels argued that if the timing of events had unfolded even a little differently, Roosevelt could easily have lost in 1936. “The apparent impact of short-term economic conditions was so powerful that, if the recession of 1938 had occurred in 1936, Roosevelt would probably have been a one-term president.” The course of American history, as well as world history, may have been radically different.

Bartels then widened his lens: All over the world, major ideological shifts occurred during the Great Depression, with the direction of those shifts varying from place to place. Was this different people siding with different ideologies for complex cultural, political, and economic reasons? Bartels didn’t think so.

The real explanation, he argues, is much simpler. And much more unsettling when you think through the implications.

In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply — and simple-mindedly — rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.

Things are worse? Punish whoever is in power. Things are better? Keep those guys in power. Notice what’s missing: any serious analysis of whether the people in power were responsible for things getting worse or better.

That is pure post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The coincidence settles it. The coincidence is all that matters.

I think Bartels is right. And while the Great Depression is an extreme example, it merely illustrates a general point of enormous significance that is downright frightening to contemplate in the midst of the growing authoritarianism and madness of Trump 2.0.

To succeed and entrench MAGA as the dominant force in American politics, Trump doesn’t have to deliver his promised “golden age.”

He can govern abominably. He can undermine American rule of law, destroy norms, and coarsen the culture. He can shred America’s vast network of friends and allies. He can torch American soft power. He can deliver four years of sheer chaos. He can do all that and still he and his movement can win again — and become as much a watershed of American history that will shape America’s future for decades to come, as FDR’s New Deal.

How? With the power of coincidence.

A simple thought experiment illustrates: Imagine AI causes an explosion of productivity in the coming years, without generating a massive wave of unemployment. Even if Trump’s economic policies damage the American and world economies to the extent Trump’s critics — and every sane economist — thinks they will, that damage would effectively be rendered invisible. What people would see is booming economy. And just like that, Donald Trump becomes the FDR of the 21st century — the one figure who, more than any other, shapes America and the world for decades.

If the fate of the man and his movement were up to Trump and his people, I would be whistling happily. He’s an incompetent boob. They are unqualified hacks. I would happily bet my life savings on their failure.

But their fate is not entirely in their hands. Nor is the fate of America. Or the world.

And that is what most scares me about Donald Trump.

Of course, the power of coincidence can cut the other way. In the election of 2020, Donald Trump was on track to almost certainly win until an obscure new virus emerged from China.

That’s the sort of thought that counts for optimism when you take the role of luck in human affairs seriously.