I’ve heard many people say that Trump is less bad than other Republicans because he is not as competent. Or maybe not less bad than other Republicans, but less bad than he would be if he were more competent. A competent Trump, they argue, would be the real nightmare.
There is some truth to this idea. One piece of evidence from Yglesias I found especially compelling was that a more competent Trump would not have pissed off John McCain so much, so Republicans would have been able to pass Obamacare repeal in 2017-18. There’s also the argument that a lot of the stuff he’s doing now - dismantling the civil service, stripping the government of DEI stuff, implementing anti-trans measures - is stuff he could have accomplished during his first term if he was more competent.
But in the piece I’d like to give the counterargument, the argument that Trump’s incompetence makes him worse.
There are three big points I’d like to make:
1. Incompetence Comes at a Cost
Last week, Trump ordered a dam to be opened so that the water could help fight the fires in Southern California. The only issue was, the dam was 200 miles away from Los Angeles, so the water had no chance of making it there. Trump just wasted 2 billion gallons of water for no reason.
That was very stupid. It wasn’t that harmful, but it was a clear example of how incompetence leads to chaos and breaking things.
Trump’s incompetence and the chaotic consequences thereof have been on full display in his first few weeks in office. He has:
Cut off foreign aid suddenly (and illegally), then declared that they would not cut off certain programs, but they did not actually implement their rescission, except (eventually) for (most of) PEPFAR (or maybe not even that?). This has left organizations that rely on that aid in crisis.
Threatened a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico for no reason, only to pull back on this temporarily after the market (predictably) tumbled and Canada and Mexico offered some fake concessions. This has created uncertainty for businesses, which we know they love.
Declared an (illegal) freeze to federal grants and loans. They then said they were rescinding this freeze, but later clarified that they were only rescinding the memo announcing the freeze and not the freeze itself (?????). It was then enjoined by the court, and hopefully is not in effect anyway, but regardless has left many people in scary uncertainty: researchers relying on NSF grants, people relying on food stamps or Medicaid, people on disability, etc.
Sent out a memo giving federal workers an 8 months severance package if they want to step down, and then seemingly did not put in a procedure for honoring this promise, meaning that a lot of employees right now don’t know if they have officially resigned?
A competent Trump would probably be less harmful right now.
2. Competence is Not What it Seems
Stop the Steal was a very stupid plan. There was no real pretext given, no concrete allegations that could be its focal point. It was just Trump and his fervent supporters latching onto every little anecdote to try to create a narrative of widespread fraud.
It was also, in my view, pretty successful. It didn’t get that close to flipping the election, but I do think it found some weak points that could be explored to steal future elections (see here, here, here). It helped weed out disloyal Republicans - from Congress, from the executive branch, from state elected offices - so that they could be replaced with loyal Trump servants in the future. The threat of violence that January 6 displayed puts extra pressure on Republican congresspeople not to resist Trump and probably caused Mitt Romney to retire from the Senate.
I don’t think you’d expect a more conventionally competent version of Trump to do a Stop The Steal. That conventionally competent version of Trump would probably be less successful at gaining power.
And Trump has been pretty insanely successful at gaining power. I really don’t think anyone could have predicted in 2014 just how quickly US democracy could be threatened. A conventionally competent person in 2015 who wanted to make themselves dictator would probably have a plan on how to keep support of the business lobby and establishment Republicans. Trump didn’t give a shit about any of that. All he did was constantly brag about how great he was and yell at everyone who stood in his way and it worked great. He was able to develop a cult of personality that allows him to threaten any politician with a primary challenge if they disobey him. Ultimately, US democracy is more fragile than people thought and in dumber ways than people thought, and Trump took full advantage.
So maybe it is true that competence is scarier than incompetence in a lot of ways, but competence is not necessarily what people think. (That said, I’m going to continue this piece with the conventional notion of competence, where Trump is less competent than other Republicans and world leaders).
3. The Orthogonality Thesis Is Fake for Politicians
My last point is challenging the model that people are using. Most people have in their mind two dials, one that says political ideology, the other that says competence, both of which can be controlled independently. This has been called the orthogonality thesis and is a big part of the debates about AI. I won’t comment on how applicable it is to AI, but for politicians I think it’s basically fake.
Competence requires you to have coherent thoughts in your brain. It requires a reasonably accurate model of the world. It usually occurs when you to have a reason for gaining power, a way that you want to use it. Other Republicans have these coherent goals, many of which I consider to be good things. They believe in following the law and in the Constitution, while Trump just does whatever the fuck he wants. They believe in expanding American influence around the globe, and in saving lives, while Trump just randomly cancels foreign aid that is buying us soft power and saving countless lives. They believe in countering China, while Trump moves to save Tiktok because he heard it helped him win the election.
Because Trump has fewer of these coherent thoughts and goals, most of his ideology is built around owning the libs, so-called negative polarization. Democrats are taking COVID seriously, better downplay it. Democrats like renewable energy, now windmills are these terrible structures destroying the environment. Democrats want to resist the Russian occupation of Ukraine, better oppose Ukraine aid (while simultaneously supporting US aid to Israel, an impressive display of cognitive dissonance).
On Electoral Success
I haven’t yet talked about whether competence helps with winning elections.
In 2016 and 2020, Trump underperformed House Republicans, while in 2024 he outperformed them. Some of that is just attributable to downballot lag, where downballot elections maintain some of the voting patterns from last election. But some of it is probably differences in candidate quality, particularly in 2020.
I do think that there’s more to the story though. Whether he was an above- or below-replacement candidate overall in 2016, Trump shuffled the electoral map substantially in Republicans’ favor - Electoral College bias went from D+1.5 in 2012 to R+2.9 in 2016, and Senate bias went from R+3.8 to R+7.6(!). I think there’s a good chance that without Trump on the top of the ticket in 2016, Democrats win the Senate elections in Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri.
This is one instance of a pattern that I think held in 2016, 20 and 24, which was that Trump was able to increase the salience of his preferred issue incredibly effectively. 2012 was about fiscal policy, and then Trump made 2016 about immigration. In 2020, the Trump campaign decided not to talk about immigration for some reason, so the election was instead about (in large part) criminal justice, and Trump managed to ingrain in a lot of voters that Biden wanted to defund the police. Then in 2024, Trump managed to shift the election so far away from abortion that Trump seemingly gained in pro-choice areas after accounting for controls, which is a result I’m so shocked by that I suspect there might be something wrong with it.
The reason for this is not complicated: Trump dominates media coverage. Trump is the main character of politics - love him or hate him, he gets to frame the story. He does this because of his unpolished “incompetent” say-whatever-the-fuck-you-want attitude, not in spite of it. Maybe that’s not the conventional image of competence, but it has gotten him extremely far.
Comparison of International Figures
Probably a good way of further evaluating this thesis is looking at international comparisons of competent vs. incompetent right-wing figures - people like Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro, Putin, Netanyahu, etc. The thing is, I don’t know enough about any country to know how competent their leader is, beyond looking at how successfully they consolidated power, which is kind of circular reasoning (see point 2). It’s also hard for me to evaluate how bad they are in a relative sense. So I’m going to skip this for now. (If you know something here and would like to share, please do!)
Ultimately, I’m not sure if a more competent Trump would be better or worse. I think he’s worse than most other Republicans, but I’m not sure if he’s worse than like JD Vance or Ron DeSantis. I do think there’s a strong case to be made that he is worse, that his incompetence only contributes to his badness.