The deep end of the no-talent pool

by David Benjamin

“[Peter] Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.” — Elon Musk

MADISON, Wis.—My friend Smedley has survived for decades as a Washington D.C. “insider.” The secret of his success is a chameleonlike knack for adjusting to the ebb and flow of the ideological tides in American politics. He keenly predicted, during the Reagan administration, that white power would become a guiding principal for the Republican Party. He wrote off the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris before they started, because, he said, “Women hate uppity women.”

More recently, he recognized that Elon Musk would become the most influential figure in the Second Reich of Donald Trump. And by God, there was Smedley, at Trump’s inauguration, whispering into Elon’s shell-like ear.

“What did you say?” I asked Smedley when I spotted him loitering on the fringe of a Hands Off rally.

Smedley smiled nostalgically. “You remember the party scene in The Graduate? Mr. McGuire corners Ben and tells him he’s only got one word to say to him. One word.”

I was ready for this. “Plastics.”

Smedley patted me on the cheek. I begged him to reveal the one word he had intimated to the incoming co-president of the United States.

“Morons,” he said.

Intuitively, I understood Smedley’s advice and how brilliant it was.

Smedley explained, “You remember when JFK said he wanted his team to be ‘the best and the brightest’? He could say that because he knew that Washington is hip-deep in smart people. To his dismay, in his first term, Donald Trump crashed head-first into this reality. After he naively appointed a whole bunch of smart folks—General Kelly, Jim Mattis, McCabe at the FBI, etc.—they cramped his style. They knew stuff. They disagreed with the Dear Leader.”

“So, now that he’s back, he wasn’t gonna make the same mistake again,” I said. “He went out looking the worst and the dullest.”

“And he’s got ‘em. When Elon called Peter Navarro a moron, he wasn’t criticizing. He was articulating Trump’s golden age of an America run by Emily Litella and Forrest Gump.”

At first blush, a national leadership composed almost entirely of idiots seems not just foolish but dangerous to the very fabric of society. I said so. “What’s wrong, I asked, “with tapping brilliant people to help run the country.”

“First of all,” said Smedley patiently, “the best and the brightest have no trouble finding a job with private organizations that will pay them handsomely. The only reason they venture into the thankless, frustrating grind of government work, at say, the Department of Justice, the National Institutes of Health or the Social Security Administration, is altruism. They make a personal sacrifice because they want to make life better for … well, the worst and the dullest. These sorts of unselfish, public-spirited geniuses are few and far between.”

Smedley raised a pedagogic finger, “On the other hand, the world is crawling with dimwits, putzes, conniving grifters, backstabbing toadies and groveling nebbishes. They teeter on a knife’s edge between success and turning into Willy Loman. Their main chance in life is to cozy up to power. The one bit of crucial knowledge lodged in their tiny brains is this: If you can wheedle your way into the corridors of power, you don’t need to be competent, or even sane.

“Once you’ve found favor with the high and mighty, you don’t need to think. You need only obey, cover yourself—if need be—with sackcloth and ashes, ask no questions, entertain no scruple and utter no dissent, no matter how vicious and vindictive, no matter how disastrous the preposterous notions of the Dear Leader.”

Smedley waxed thoughtful about the tendencies of a presidential regime for which his strategic whisper could claim to be its inspiration. He said, “For the top dog, the beauty part of being surrounded by yes-men and suck-ups is that the team of morons tends to incite the leader’s worst, stupidest impulses.”

I agreed, offering Trump’s tariff madness as an example.

“Exactly,” said Smedley, “and then there’s the matter of nookie. We should’ve seen it coming two or three marriages—and a few hundred bimbos—ago.”

I was puzzled. Smedley said. “Has there ever been president who so systemically filled his inner circle with arm candy?”

“Arm candy?”

“Let’s leave out Melania, okay? By now, she’s way back in the rearview mirror,” said Smedley. “In past administrations your typical female Cabinet member was a girl who knew her ass from her elbow but she wasn’t exactly … winsome, ya dig? I mean, think Frances Perkins, Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright. But now, hubba hubba! You’ve got a whole chorus line of broads hanging around the White House who could’ve been recruited out of an escort service in Las Vegas. Tulsi Gabbard, Kari Lake, Alina Habba, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and the dizzy blonde who runs the press office. I mean, admittedly a few of them you might call cougars, but Trump is pushing eighty years. For him, a fifty-year-old looker is a dewy-eyed teenager.”

I protested. “You don’t mean to suggest, absent any evidence, that there is—God forbid—a casting couch in the Oval Office?” Infamous names like Judith Exner and Monica Lewinsky intruded themselves into my unwilling consciousness.

Smedley’s knowing smirk suggested more than I wanted to know. He changed subjects. “The beauty part of hiring clueless, submissive shmucks.” he began.

“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t you already tell me the beauty part?”

“This is another one, “said Smedley. “They’re expendable.”

“Morons being a dime a dozen?”

“Right, but more important than their sheer abundance, your typical hapless imbecile suddenly appears out of nowhere—think Michael Waltz—and, if he screws up, you can disappear him right back into nowhere and fill the gap with another nameless lickspittle. Think of how simple governing suddenly becomes.”

Smedley took a deep breath. “Picture, for example, the difficulty that ensues after, say, you fire the guy who manages the decontamination and safe long-terms sequestration of fissionable materials. You need to find a new nuclear physicist who’s qualified and willing to accept the huge responsibility. The search could take weeks, months. But if you’re willing to plug a moron into the job, the no-talent pool is just about infinite. You could hire your son-in-law, or your little boy’s Cub Scout den mother. Then, if the doofus ends up accidentally leaking a cloud of Strontium 90 that kills a flock of two thousand sheep and a couple of shepherds in Wyoming, you can casually send the putz packing out the back door, with a boot on the ass and no fuss, because who knew he had the job in the first place? Then, you trot out your Barbie-doll press secretary, to issue a cover story that almost magically satisfies a White House press corps that’s occupationally desperate for ‘access’ to its daily dose of presidential bullshit. There are no impertinent questions. The last rites for the dead shepherds go discreetly unreported.”

“Which goes to show,” I said.

Smedley nodded. “Yeah, stupidity is contagious.”

“From the top down,” I added.