Trump's Big CON: Life is Not a Reality TV Show

Trump says "he can make decisions 'with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words 'common sense,' because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.' . .

[But] Trump is about to be thrust into a situation unlike any he has faced before, one in which he will be forced to make an endless string of critically important decisions. . .

Since Trump has neither worked a day in government nor evinced the barest interest in policy, there will be almost no decisions to which Trump will bring any base of knowledge.

That means that perhaps more than any president in history, he’ll have to rely on the people who know more about that particular area than he does to give him the information he needs to make the best decision. This is something all presidents must do, but Trump will be further hampered by what appears to be a deep distrust of anyone who actually has that kind of knowledge.

I suspect that distrust comes from what is obviously his profound intellectual insecurity — no actual smart person goes around saying things like 'I’m, like, a smart person' and 'Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy' and 'I have a very good brain' and 'Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time' and 'Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person,' unless they have some serious issues.

But for whatever reason, Trump is positively contemptuous of those with expertise, as we saw over and over during the campaign. . .

So inside the Oval Office, a particular scenario will likely play itself out over and over. Trump will be presented with a decision he has to make on a matter about which he knows nothing. In order to bring him up to speed, he’ll be given the views of some experts, perhaps in person, or in a document, or communicated by his close aides. He’ll then have to weigh what those experts have told him. And what will he do? There’s no way to predict. On one hand, he has this contempt for experts, yet on the other hand, as Jenna Johnson and Robert Costa reported in August, according to those around him, 'Trump tends to echo the words of the last person with whom he spoke, making direct access to him even more valuable.'

This is all made even more unusual by the fact that Trump has no coherent ideology or policy agenda. . . [so] it’s impossible to predict what he might think about an issue he hasn’t dealt with directly, and there’s no way to know whether what he thinks about it today will be the same thing he thinks about it tomorrow."

Read the Washington Post, Why we should be terrified of Donald Trump’s decision-making process.