I recently read two books about the internal workings of the Trump administration from people I respect. Casey Mulligan's You're Hired and Scott Atlas's A Plague Upon Our House are both very good. They offer a different lens through which to view an administration that's usually portrayed as oafish and arbitrary. I'm no fan of Mr. Trump. He generally had a terrible policy agenda and the way he conducted himself in office (particularly on the way out!) was atrocious. At the same time, the media's derangement at him (a literal syndrome) often led to an inaccurate picture of his administration. Seriously, it's like some of his detractors think his staff were a bunch of morons wandering aimlessly around the White House saying "Duh. Duh." to each other. Not that they were all great minds, but they were mostly professional, honorable people who wanted to serve their country. I'm sure they had intelligent conversations about policy including discussions of various considerations (if not full blown cost-benefit analyses). It's likely most of them were not particularly big fans of Mr. Trump but saw an opportunity to steer the beast.
I've known about Scott Atlas for years. I was introduced to him by an Econtalk episode, which led me to read his earlier book In Excellent Health. I thought the media treatment of him was shitty, and people I know recited talking-points about him to me. These were mostly know-nothing, NPC-style recitations on topics they had no background information on. I sometimes had the energy to push back and say I knew something about him. Atlas is clearly a knowledgeable person on public health issues in addition to being an honorable person.
Atlas was the "anti-Fauci". Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx were two of the other advisers to Trump's pandemic policy. Atlas paints them as being reflexively pro-lockdown, favoring anything that might plausibly reduce Covid numbers and ignoring any costs of such policies. Atlas was an important counter-weight to the establishment faction. It was a virtual guarantee that the establishment/alarmist position would be represented among Trump's advisors. Someone had to be in the White House to offer the non-catastrophizing take on Covid policy. We were lucky to have had someone like Atlas, who had the president's trust and respect. Fauci and Birx are depicted as not really having their bags packed, so to speak. They had at best passing familiarity with literature on, for example, the effectiveness of masking. (When Atlas asked Birx for the evidence that convinced her of the effectiveness of masking, Atlas explains that he'd read the same paper and found it unconvincing. It was not exactly an RCT.) They were more concerned about consistent, simple messaging than they were about how those messages mapped on to the underlying reality. That's a dangerous play for a prominent figure in public health. The risk is that you cling tenaciously to a dangerous falsehood even as discrediting information comes in, or that your lack of nuance turns off citizens who are paying close attention. Atlas was a wink at those more observant citizens, as if to say to them, "Yes, we know that slogan-length public health messaging is oversimplified and often wrong. The president knows that they are picking which actions they want you to take, then back-fitting the messaging to get you to do it."
In You're Hired, Mulligan paints an interesting picture of the internal workings of the White House. Trump's tweets are often depicted as impulsive, as if he pounded out stray thoughts with his thumbs before rolling over and going to bed. Mulligan describes a more deliberate approach. Trump himself was not the author of most of those tweets. They were crafted by a team, often with some internal A/B testing or informal focus grouping. These tweets were often used to take the public's temperature, rather than to cram a half-baked policy down their throats. The intent was often to gauge the public's reaction. In describing this, I'm not opining on the morality of his approach to the public. There is something creepy about a president behaving this way. But Mulligan's narrative does contrast with the dominant media narrative of the Trump White House.
A couple of things bothered me about Mulligan's book. He had an entire chapter on the "opioid epidemic". He basically recited the standard narrative, that a bunch of irresponsible doctors, encouraged by greedy pharmaceutical companies, overprescribed opioids. And this supposedly created a new class of addicts. There are serious problems with this narrative. He even blamed "lax drug policy" for the increase in overdose deaths, specifically calling out Eric Holder for his memo encouraging some laxness in applying harsh statutory sentencing. He suggests (I can't recall if implicitly or explicitly) that we could have kept fentanyl from hitting the drug market through stricter enforcement. The opposite is true; there never would have been demand for recreational fentanyl in a legal market. (This is really absurd. The sheer potency of fentanyl makes it impossible to interdict.) People need to seriously stop pretending like we've been trying libertarian drug policy for the last 20 years. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Holder memo might have had some tiny marginal effect on drug trafficking, but blaming it for an already-existing trend in rising overdose deaths is pretty dubious. I have to give Mulligan a strike or two for getting this one wrong, because I think it's one of the greatest injustices of American domestic policy. This is a massive moral blind-spot for him. Interestingly, he repeatedly plugs some kind of software algorithm called "theory guru". Supposedly this algorithm can automatically check if your economic assumptions are consistent with each other. He should have turned this loose on his musings about drug policy. If you place any credence at all on economics as a way of thinking, you will come to the conclusion that drug prohibition is an utter contradiction. Mulligan is using a very simple analysis, "If you raise the cost of doing something, you get less of it." Okay, but you "raise the cost" by gratuitously hurting people. Most people who think about this clearly will say that demand for drug use is inelastic, so a 1% increase in the "price" (monetary and non-monetary, including harms from the legal system etc.) will yield less than a corresponding 1% drop in drug use. This is a losing game. The harm to remaining users is necessarily greater than the "savings" to those who are successfully deterred. I like Mulligan, but it feels like he seriously fell down on this one.
The other thing I didn't care for was Mulligan's qualified defense of populism. He has some righteous anger at technocrats. I understand the sentiment. Technocrats can get things badly wrong, and people get hurt because of it. But the alternative is to basically yield to popular demands, which can be even worse. Seriously, he had me reaching for Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter to serve as an antidote. Maybe his point was merely that DC technocrat-types are out of touch and don't care about the same issues as the median American (whatever that means). But it's a confusing message for a mostly free-market style economist like Mulligan. He has some harsh words for Peter Navarro, who is basically the public face of Trump's idiotic protectionism. I feel like he needed to grapple a little more with the fact that Trump's protectionism has broad popular appeal. Voters are mistaken about the effects of such economic policies, and it's his job as an economist to push back and correct their errors. If voters have a tendency to be authoritarian and to impose bad laws on their neighbors, I say technocrats can serve as a useful counterweight. I don't want to be ruled by either a populist mob or an academic technocracy, but I can see a useful role of each as a check on the other.
I don't intent to write a comprehensive review of either book. I did want to share a slightly more coherent view of the Trump administration. If nothing else, these books offered some mild assurances that there's an adult in the room, even if the president is an idiot. There's usually someone around to say, "That's a terrible idea," or "Um, the president can't do that, sir."
