“Five percent think, ten percent think they think and 85% would rather die than think.” - Thomas Edison
There is a revealing moment early in HBO’s new documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” where Donald Trump is shown expressing his hatred - yes, hatred, as the reader will shortly see - for the young men accused of the 1989 rape and beating a female jogger in New York’s Central Park. He argues that if society needs a little hate for justice to be served, then so be it. He would eventually take out full-page ads in the city’s four major papers calling for a return to the death penalty. As New York reporter Pete Hamill, subject of the documentary, wrote at the time, “Snarling and heartless and fraudulently tough, insisting on the virtues of stupidity, it was the epitome of blind negation. Hate was just another luxury and Trump stood naked…Forget poverty and its causes…Fry them into passivity.”
It was an early insight into dark heart and empty mind of the man who would become President of the United States.
Yet as much as those early clips presaged what we’ve come to know about the future president – the rash judgment, the disregard for basic civil rights, the racial overtones as he appealed to the public’s worst instincts – it was the aftermath that is perhaps more telling and far more troubling. And we are just now seeing the cost of putting such a man in the Oval Office. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first...
The Central Park Five, as the five men Donald Trump wanted to see die would come to be known, eventually had their convictions vacated in 2002, when a convicted rapist provided an accurate and detailed confession to the crime, including non-public evidence known only by the police that could be used to confirm a confessor was knowledgeable about the case, backed up by DNA evidence that not only proved his guilt, but exonerated the Central Park Five.
Donald Trump was not moved. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he maintained they were guilty and refused to apologize for his false accusations that helped create the mob justice mindset that surrounded their initial trial. As recently as 2016, a quarter century after the initial assault and fourteen years following their vindication, then-candidate Trump was still proclaiming their guilt, lamenting their release and criticizing the settlement they had received from the city.
This is classic Trump - react without thinking, internalize that thoughtless instinct, then refuse to let go regardless what evidence to the contrary might exist. As one White House aide states in Bob Woodward’s book Fear, “There are some things on which he’s already reached a conclusion, it doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter what arguments you offer, he’s not listening.”
This should come as no surprise. The president’s own words suggest a decision-making process absent thought or facts. Last November, on Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, he told the Washington Post, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” Regarding climate change, he said, “I have a natural instinct for science.” In neither case did he offer a basis for his opinion, nor did he indicate that he’d studied the reasoning behind the Fed’s decision or the science underlying climate change. Instead, all he had was a gut feel and he went with it.
He’s gone with his gut many times. Consider the decisions made with little to no justification outside of sound bite reasoning:
He pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
He pulled out of the Paris climate change accord
He pulled out of the Iran nuclear treaty
He pulled out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia
He announced an abrupt withdrawal of our troops from Syria
The president justifies these decisions on his gut instinct and, as he told Morning Joe back in 2016, his “very good brain.”
But science does not back him up. Despite what the president claims, and many of his supporters believe, we do not make good decisions when we go with instinct. In fact, we are far likelier to be wildly wrong when we go with our gut. And those who believe they are immune to this truth are often the worst offenders. This is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the well-known phenomenon where people tend to overestimate their knowledge or ability, especially among people of low ability (the opposite tends to be true of high-performing people, who tend to underestimate their abilities since they are more likely to know what they don’t know or at least recognize that they probably don’t know everything about a given topic). Two quotes capture this quite well: William Butler Yeats’ observation that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” and Henry Kissinger’s assertion that "To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." Donald Trump would appear to fall into Kissinger’s latter category.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the famed Israeli psychologists who essentially created the field of behavioral psychology demonstrated time and again the bad decisions humans make when they go on instinct rather than data. Their work became the basis for everything from data science to Moneyball. They showed humans were so inept at making gut decisions that when asked if their work was the basis for artificial intelligence, Dr. Tversky drolly replied no, that what they studied was natural stupidity.
And yet, we have a president - a rather unintelligent one at that - who relies exclusively, proudly on his natural stupidity. We can only pray that his doesn’t become ours.
