Incompetence, or more particularly the Dunning-Kruger Effect, was on international display this month, as President Donald Trump disgraced the office in his handling of the high-level discussions with leaders concerning the war in Ukraine.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low competence in a particular area overestimate their own abilities, unaware of their own shortcomings. The effect, named after psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, highlights that the very lack of knowledge needed to perform well also prevents someone from accurately assessing their poor performance.
Trump apparently thinks he has excellent negotiating skills that apply to major armed conflicts. However, Putin played Trump masterfully, generous with crude flattery, something the European leaders later offered at the White House. This former KGB operative softened up Trump by saying he agreed with him that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and he agreed with him that the war would not have started if Trump had been president [as Trump has broadly claimed].
The bottom line is that Putin was treated as an equal on US soil when he is an internationally indicted war criminal. He managed to sidestep any potential American sanctions and announced no battlefield concessions, The Wall Street Journal observed. Trump, on the other hand, who once boasted of ending the war in 24 hours of being president, couldn’t even get a temporary ceasefire.
“Putin’s journey from pariah to peer was complete,” Bloomberg.com pointed out.
Fiona Hill, a former national security officer specializing in Russia and Europe, assessed the meetings as all about managing Trump. She said
“The Russians don’t want to give any security guarantees to the Ukrainians; Putin doesn’t want to meet with Zelensky. And really what he’s doing is trying to manage Trump and to kind of try to tamp down now Trump’s expectations so that he can keep pursuing the complete capitulation of Ukraine.”
In the interview, Hill was asked why European leaders accompanied Zelensky to the meeting with Trump at the White House, and how significant was that? She responded, “They wanted to prevent Trump from making unilateral decisions about Ukraine’s territory and to ensure they weren’t excluded from negotiations. It was a strategic move to counter Putin’s influence and manage Trump’s expectations.”
The visit of the European leaders showed Trump out of his depth. One observer said, “These are serious people dealing with serious issues – and [Trump] reacts to them like a bored child who can’t wait for the other person to stop talking, so he can start.”
He couldn’t stay on point. At one point in the transcript, there was the following exchange in front of the press.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: “[E]very single child has to go back to its family. This should be one of our main priorities in negotiations, to make sure that the children come back to Ukraine, to their families.”
Trump: “Thank you, and we did. I was just thinking, we’re here for a different reason, but we uh just a couple of weeks ago made the largest trade deal in history. That’s a big, that’s a big thing, and congratulations, that’s great. Thank you very much.”
I think about the Dunning-Kruger Effect every time Trump calls some highly qualified and accomplished individual “dumb.”
Meanwhile, many of us are more concerned about the Trump administration moving the country into an authoritarian state. Maybe not, says one observer: “So if you’re worried about Trump amassing unstoppable power, here’s your consolation: He is probably too incompetent to pull it off,” wrote Matt Lewis in The Hill.
Let us hope so.
