Trump’s Second Term and the Rise of Institutional Stupidity

The first and second Trump administrations have provoked sharply different kinds of criticism. In 2016, the shock of Donald Trump’s election coincided with Britain’s Brexit referendum, ushering in widespread liberal anxiety about the collapse of objective truth. The political moment was defined by fears of “post-truth,” “fake news,” and the erosion of professional journalism under pressure from social media, bots, and disinformation campaigns. When presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway introduced the phrase “alternative facts” shortly after Trump’s first inauguration, it appeared to crystallise a new era in which truth itself was under siege.

That panic over truth, however, had unintended consequences. The language of “fake news” was quickly weaponised by Trump and his allies to discredit any unfavourable reporting. A rapidly expanding MAGA media ecosystem amplified falsehoods and denials, while liberal expertise seemed increasingly ineffective at holding power to account. Thinkers turned to Hannah Arendt, who had warned in The Origins of Totalitarianism that totalitarianism thrives not on belief in lies, but on the collapse of the distinction between fact and fiction.

By 2025, the tone of criticism has shifted. Trump’s lies are no less frequent or brazen, but they are no longer shocking. They are familiar, expected, and largely “priced in.” Instead, many critics now argue that the defining feature of Trump’s second administration is not deception, but stupidity.

This diagnosis cuts across ideological lines. In January, centrist columnist David Brooks published “The Six Principles of Stupidity,” arguing that the administration consistently failed to ask the most basic question: what happens next? Hillary Clinton echoed the sentiment in a March op-ed bluntly titled “How Much Dumber Will This Get?” while Marxist writer Richard Seymour described “stupidity as a historical force,” quoting Trotsky’s observation that when political life declines, reason gives way to insult and prejudice.

Two features of Trump 2.0 stand out as newly and unmistakably stupid. The first is staggering incompetence, exemplified by a fiasco in which the editor of The Atlantic was accidentally added to a Signal group chat discussing sensitive US military operations alongside senior officials. The second is the administration’s determination to pursue policies—such as sweeping tariffs and the defunding of medical research—that promise clear harm without any obvious benefit, even to Trump’s own supporters.

Nowhere is this clearer than in public health. The appointment of a prominent vaccine sceptic as secretary of health and human services, along with bans on fluoride in tap water in states like Utah and Florida at Robert F Kennedy Jr’s urging, represents not just an abandonment of truth but an assault on evidence-based governance. Irrationality, once confined to rhetoric, has seeped directly into the machinery of the state.

Observers often struggle to interpret such actions. There is a temptation to assume hidden strategies: that blunders are deliberate, that chaos conceals a master plan. Yet this risks attributing intelligence where there may be none. As political scientist Robyn Marasco has noted, conspiracy theory can become a “love affair with power,” mistaking incoherence for cunning. The opposing reaction—reducing everything to personal derangement—invites its own problems, slipping into amateur psychiatry or social Darwinism.

Cultural comparisons have followed. Trump’s second term has frequently been likened to Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, a satire depicting a future America governed by stupidity, consumerism, and spectacle. While the film feels eerily prescient in its portrayal of a celebrity president and degraded public life, its underlying premise—that society collapses because “stupid” people reproduce more than “smart” ones—carries troubling echoes of eugenics. Liberal frustration after Brexit, when some muttered that many Leave voters would die before the consequences arrived, revealed how easily critiques of stupidity can slide into dark fantasies.

There is, nevertheless, a widespread hope that stupidity will eventually be punished by reality. Britain’s brief Liz Truss premiership in 2022, undone by bond markets after just 49 days, offers a precedent. Many have looked to markets as the ultimate backstop against Trump’s policies. Yet this faith is limited. Markets may curb the worst excesses, but they do not restore understanding. They merely register pain.

To grasp the deeper problem, stupidity must be understood not as an individual defect but as a systemic condition. In The Stupidity Paradox, André Spicer and Mats Alvesson argue that organisations can make stupidity “functional,” suppressing intelligence despite clear negative consequences. Trumpian stupidity, however, goes further. It is not an accidental by-product of complex systems, but an enforced assault on institutions—universities, public health bodies, market data—that help society make sense of itself.

This connects to a longer history. From Friedrich Hayek’s defence of markets as superior knowledge systems to Silicon Valley’s faith in big data and algorithms, modern societies have increasingly outsourced judgment to impersonal mechanisms. Prices, metrics, and pattern recognition promise to replace human reasoning. In such a world, intelligence is reduced to scoring and ranking behaviours, not understanding meaning.

Digital platforms intensify this trend. False rumours can move markets as effectively as accurate information, as seen when a viral but unfounded claim about pausing Trump’s tariffs briefly sent the S&P 500 soaring before it crashed again within the hour. Truth and falsehood become equivalent data points, valuable only for the reactions they generate.

This environment also underpins what scholars Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead call the “new conspiracism.” Unlike classic conspiracy theories, which over-elaborate causal explanations, the new conspiracism dispenses with explanation altogether. It relies on repetition, innuendo, and social validation: if enough people say it, it is “true enough.” Claims circulate not to explain the world, but to generate engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

Seen this way, many absurd claims made by Republican politicians about tariffs, vaccines, or disasters are less lies than memes—symbolic repetitions within a media ecosystem that has abandoned causal explanation. Individuals may appear stupid, but the deeper issue is a system that rewards mimicry over understanding.

Hannah Arendt distinguished between “preliminary” understanding—applying familiar concepts to events—and “true” understanding, which requires imagination. Imagination, for Arendt, allows humans to grasp the meaning of genuinely new situations through empathy and creative judgment. Politics, she argued, cannot be reduced to data or technique; it demands an aesthetic sense of proportion and perspective.

This is precisely what markets, platforms, and artificial intelligence cannot provide. They process patterns at extraordinary speed, but they do not judge. They cannot tell us what an event means. Trump’s administration, with its ignorance of consequences and indifference to evidence, exemplifies stupidity in its purest form. The economic damage of tariffs and the unfolding crises in public health demonstrate that foundational expertise still matters.

Yet simply restoring expert orthodoxy is not enough. Stupidity today is not only tolerated by contemporary capitalism; it is often rewarded. Judgment has been outsourced, imagination neglected, and meaning flattened into metrics. Trumpism offers no hope, but its excesses may force a reckoning.

In the end, no market, algorithm, or machine can rescue society from stupidity. As Arendt suggested, the remedy lies in recovering human judgment and imagination—the capacity to think, to understand novelty, and to see events in their proper historical perspective. Without that, the flood of stupidity will continue to rise.