No. of Recommendations: 12
Had he made this about China and the European Union we could have made some real progress but the moron slapped tariffs on countries that we have a trade surplus with. That makes zero sense whatsoever.
Well, it is of a piece with the Administration's broader philosophy to governance.
The Administration, and Trump in particular, has a lot of disdain for the things the government normally uses to make sure that policy proposals "make sense." The government has (had?) a lot of procedures, institutions, and experts on hand to make sure that a lot of knowledgeable eyes looked at policy proposals. They're their to increase the chances of catching if something didn't make sense, was sloppy, was internally inconsistent, or had potential unintended negative consequences.
Trump doesn't value that approach. He actively dislikes it. He distrusts those experts and institutions, and doesn't want the delays that carefully developing a policy requires. It's of a piece with the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley - the belief that it's better to do everything quickly and course-correct if it turns out you made any big mistakes. You need to be fast, and it's better to be fast and make mistakes than to try to be perfect but be really slow. You need to entirely centralize all policy formation and review to the Oval Office, because no one else knows any better or has any legitimate role other than the President and his inner circle.
This is what you get when you don't do things deliberately and utilize the tools that government has built up over decades to avoid making mistakes before they happen. You get a more nimble government, but one that's more prone to doing things that "make zero sense whatsoever."
