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Friends,
If you hadn’t noticed, Trump’s war in Iran is failing. Iran is more dangerous today than it was when he initiated it, and energy prices are far higher.
Trump’s brutal efforts to crackdown on undocumented people in the United States have generated a huge backlash, including among Latinos who voted for him in 2024 but are moving into the Democratic camp.
His attempt to cover up the Epstein files continues to rankle MAGA voters.
His $1.8 billion “slush” fund and family immunization from future IRS audits, in “settlement” of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, has drawn widespread bipartisan scorn and hit judicial roadblocks.
I could go on, but you get the point. Trump’s failures are mounting.
Why?
I’ve worked for three presidents and advised a fourth. All of them solicited honest feedback, including criticism.
Trump solicits only praise. He relishes compliments. He needs everyone around him to pander to his egomaniacal need for admiration. He punishes the bearers of bad news.
He promotes people who kiss his assets, such as Bill Pulte, the home-building heir Trump put in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and who Trump is now making acting director of national intelligence.
Pulte has no known experience in national security. An equally large problem is he got the job because he told Trump exactly what Trump wanted to hear, and presumably — as the person in charge of national intelligence — will continue to tell Trump what he wants to hear. Rather than national intelligence, Trump will get untrammeled stupidity.
Trump has so many people “he could be listening to,” said a former Trump official, “and he listens to Pulte, who just continually f*cks things up.”
Pulte weaponized the Federal Housing Finance Agency to give Trump dirt on people Trump wanted dirt on, such as Fed governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom Pulte accused of mortgage fraud. (In fact, there was no dirt; Pulte’s accusations weren’t found to be true in either case.)
Instead of telling Trump the truth — that these people did nothing wrong, and that Trump shouldn’t be using the agency to try to persecute innocent people — Pulte did the opposite. He’s an unprincipled hack.
So how does Trump make decisions if he doesn’t have people telling him the truth?
He relies, he has said, on his gut. “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” He told The Washington Post that he reaches decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already have], plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense.”
In other words, he doesn’t listen to anyone — especially not anyone who tells him anything he doesn’t want to hear.
Presto. He makes colossal mistakes.
Trump doesn’t even want to admit he’s been warned that he’s wrong. When it was reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Dan Caine cautioned Trump that strikes against Iran could potentially draw the U.S. into a prolonged conflict, Trump described the report as “fake news” and posted: “General Caine, like all of us, would like not to see war, but, if a decision is made on going against Iran at a military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won.”
For many months, Trump tried to sit on the Epstein files. It took someone no longer in the Trump administration who had nothing left to lose — his first-term national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — to plead with him to reconsider: “@realdonaldtrump please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away,” Flynn wrote, adding that failing to address unanswered Epstein questions would make facing other national challenges “much harder.”
Even normal people don’t like to get negative feedback. And most people don’t want to give it.
Yet receiving and giving truthful feedback are absolutely essential in a complex world.
If you have power over other people, it’s even more important to get negative feedback, because your mistakes could harm many others. Yet the more power you have, the less willing people are to give you negative feedback, since they have more reason to fear your reaction to it. Which means you have to go out of your way to solicit it.
The best leaders I’ve had the privilege of serving during my nearly 60 years of working life have been people who have actively sought and rewarded negative feedback.
Trump does just the opposite. Small wonder he’s one of the worst leaders the nation has ever endured.
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