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In most White Houses, policy and action flow down, with staff trying to implement
what the president wants—or, at the very least, what the chief of staff says the president
wants. In the Trump White House, policy making, from the very first instance of Bannon’s
immigration EO, flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall
style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought
of this himself (a result that was often helped along with the suggestion that he had in fact
already had the thought).
Trump, observed Walsh, had a set of beliefs and impulses, much of them on his mind
for many years, some of them fairly contradictory, and little of them fitting legislative or
political conventions or form. Hence, she and everyone else was translating a set of
desires and urges into a program, a process that required a lot of guess work. It was, said
Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”
But making suggestions was deeply complicated. Here was, arguably, the central issue
of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: he
didn’t process information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at
all.
Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist.
Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was
some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or
at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s
Page Six.) Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others
concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one
of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.
But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And
he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone
else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you
were worthy of attention.
The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it
to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts
and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.
Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was
overrated. After all, so often people who had worked hard to know what they knew made
the wrong decisions. So maybe the gut was as good, or maybe better, at getting to the heart
of the matter than the wonkish and data-driven inability to see the forest for the trees that
often seemed to plague U.S. policy making. Maybe. Hopefully.
Of course, nobody really believed that, except the president himself.
Still, here was the basic faith, overriding his impetuousness and eccentricities and
limited knowledge base: nobody became the president of the United States—that camel-
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