In 2003, as the United States sought the world’s support for an invasion of Iraq, France opposed the war at the United Nations. In response, some American politicians pushed to rename french fries to “Freedom Fries” in public buildings and restaurants.
This was stupid. That is not a word I like to use, and I tell my kids not to use it to refer to others, but here it’s the best one for the job and I will use it liberally. I don’t mean simply that Freedom Fries was a bad idea - an idea that was too vague, or had the wrong goal, or was likely to fail. There are plenty of those, and they’re a normal and even essential part of debate. I mean that it was pointless, petty, and inane. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli is said to have dismissed some theories as “not even wrong,” by which he meant they were so useless that they could not even be deemed incorrect. Freedom Fries was not even wrong: it was an idea that did not have enough content or purpose to be bad. For an elected leader to introduce that idea, on behalf of his constituency, was to trivialize the debate on an issue that meant life or death for millions of people.
Still, this was a minor episode. We now endure an administration that introduces stupid ideas daily, in ways both trivial and grave, in both their aims and execution. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico, starting a tariff war with our closest trading partners (only to immediately call it off), proposing annexation of Canada, proposing to take over Gaza and turn it into a resort, sending teenage software engineers to carry out a blanket overhaul of the entire civil service - including nuclear safety, pandemic preparedness, etc.: these are ideas that are not only stupid but appear to be willfully, gleefully so.
What is happening?
During President Trump’s first term, Adam Serwer memorably claimed that “the cruelty is the point.” When critics attempted to shame the President and his supporters for cruelty - against women coming forward about sexual abuse, victims of natural disasters, children separated from their families, etc. - they were missing the point. As Serwer argued, persuasively, cruelty was deployed deliberately as a way for the administration to demonstrate its dominance and build community with its base.
Cruelty is one of the Trump Administration’s core values, if they can be called that, along with stupidity and greed; it’s difficult to find a signature initiative that doesn’t reflect at least one of these. If cruelty is the point, could it be the case that stupidity is, too? It reflects the administration's lack of seriousness and preparation, but perhaps it serves a purpose as well.
Stupidity is an instrument of control.
Dominance displays are an important part of the way Trump, Musk, and the administration at large relate to the rest of the world. If you can force someone to act in a way that you prescribe, your power is manifest to all. It’s all the better if that prescription is stupid: when there’s no reason the other party would have taken that action but for your command, when that action is in fact a confusing waste of time, your power is even clearer. Every time we see "Gulf of America" in Google Maps, the stupidity of the change is a reminder of the President’s naked power.
Stupidity creates useful chaos.
President Trump prefers chaos to orderly operation, presumably in part because he enjoys the attention, but in part because chaos creates confusion, prevents sustained attention, and allows him and his team to do whatever they like while everyone is distracted. This cynical, nihilistic approach is expressly part of the administration's communications strategy of "flooding the zone," and it works even better with stupidity. When an idea is cogent, even if bad, people can take sides and argue - it might rob us of our attention, but not our bearings. When the idea is stupid, it can be so bewildering that we are left disoriented; before we can even settle into positions, we are left trying to understand what even motivated the idea in the first place: Did he really say that? What was he thinking? I am still trying to understand how a man can be elected President of the United States and also think that bleach injections might be a good idea.
Stupidity prevents debate.
The most insidious effect of stupidity is that it short circuits the possibility of debate. When someone proposes a bad idea, we can explain why it will fail. When someone proposes a stupid idea, an idea that is useless on its face, it can be difficult to know where to start. The window for making an argument in public is often narrow, no more than a soundbite, and it counterintuitively takes too long to argue against a stupid idea because you have to start from basics.
DOGE's approach to the civil service is plainly stupid. Of course there are places where the government could be more efficient and effective, and there might be offices and programs that are unnecessary; this has been bipartisan consensus for decades. But an elementary school student could name the ways that real people depend on the government's work. Separating value from waste is a serious task for serious people, not something for a handful of software engineers with no understanding of those programs to do over a weekend. This argument is so basic that to make it feels like being the oblivious straight man in a comedy duo. The tragedy is that the level of energy DOGE demonstrates might have actually been put to good use, but as it is, DOGE is so triumphantly stupid as to be beyond reason. Arguing against it plainly misses the point.
For the duration of this presidency, we will be forced to endure more lies, more corruption, more cruelty, and more destruction of the institutions, norms, and alliances that made America strong. Alongside all of that, we will have to endure a torrent of stupidity. Perhaps there is solace in knowing that it is deliberate. Perhaps not.