One of the hardest things to understand about graft, corruption, and self-dealing is how extraordinarily wasteful they can be.
Grifters don’t care how much value they destroy, as long as they make money on the deal.
Grifters don’t care how much value they destroy, as long as they make money on the deal.
For example: no-bid contracts for disaster relief supplies that never get delivered. Result: no help or repairs now; no way to minimize further damage. Real cost: hugely more than the price of those missing supplies.
Temporarily getting control of a business, then running a bust-out fraud (as seen in Goodfellas and The Sopranos), wastes big value for little profit — but that profit goes to the guys running the bust-out. The cost goes to everyone else.
In order to make sense of Trump, you have to understand that he went broke a long time ago, and has essentially been a con man ever since.
It’s why he’s got that long history of bankruptcies, unpaid bills, hastily offloaded projects, and premium-priced but ultimately valueless products. He flat-out does not care about other people’s consequences.
I honestly believe he initially ran for president because he heard that candidates get to keep unspent campaign contributions. That’s certainly how he ran his campaign.
Then he got drunk on egoboo and made Con Man Mistake #1: not getting out in time. It couldn’t have been clearer that he had no idea what the job entailed.
My point: don't assume Trump’s actions are random, even though some of them undoubtedly are.
I believe he’s enthusiastic about his wall because he likes being in control of large, hazily-understood construction & development projects that are being paid for by other people. He’s made a lot of money that way.
I believe he appoints unqualified people because he figures they’ll be loyal to him, not the job, and won’t have natural allies there who do care how the job gets done.
Actually getting things done is complicated, because you have to deal with the real world. Con games are simpler, because they’re about patterns of human behavior.
Trump generates the appearance of complexity because he’s gotten into the control room of a very complex system. Except for those times when he’s pushing buttons at random, he’s got a very finite set of moves.
He has five job skills: figuring out how he can derive personal benefit from situations, looking vaguely like an important guy who knows stuff, doing favors for guys who can do him favors, getting out before he has to pay up, and punishing noncompliance.
In a pinch, just assume his reasons for doing things are simpler, dumber, and more appallingly venal than you initially thought.
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