The GOP's Competence Gap

A couple of years into the Trump administration, I had a conversation with a Trump supporter who lived outside of the beltway. “I bet you people in DC can’t stand him,” he said. He was right. But not, I told him, entirely for the reasons he had in mind. Yes, Trump’s far-right populist politics were out of step with the heavy Democratic lean of Washington, DC, and out of step with even most DC conservatives. Lots of think tankers, advisors, and agency staffers thought his policies were bad.

But the other upsetting aspect of Trump’s administration to the Beltway professional class was its incompetence. Yes, the Trump administration and its legislators and judicial appointees were wrong outside of normal DC parameters. They also were just very bad at their jobs.

Being effective politically, in the sense of crafting policy and getting it implemented, requires a rather significant amount of knowledge. Both of the details of policy design—and the related fields like economics, political science, international relations, etc., that go along with it—and the details of how Washington’s institutions work.

What I said to this Trump supporter was that it was upsetting to those with that knowledge to watch those without grab the reins of power and then fumble their way through misusing them. “You, in particular, should be mad,” I added, “because you’d sent your guy to Washington and he and his people were too dumb to get done what they’d promised you they’d get done.

In the years since, this problem has only gotten worse for the GOP, which has filled its ranks with the generally incompetent. Trump might still win next week, and have another four years to give it all another try, but his victory won’t be the result of GOP competence, but instead Trump’s own celebrity.

As the GOP, and American conservatism more broadly, have gone full-MAGA, it’s driven out competent legislators, regulators, policy analysts, staffers, and campaign operatives, because it turns out competent people know enough to recognize how bad MAGA policies are, and so want nothing to do with them, or the shrill and weird people who are their most vocal avatars.

Take, for example, a story published this morning at Wired about the Trump campaign’s Michigan ground game.

Trump has outsourced much of his campaign’s operations to Elon Musk, who has demonstrated poor judgement and poorer understanding of, well, pretty much everything. He’s turned the RNC into a sinecure for low-information family members and a personal slush fund. Trump aligned think tanks have gone so extreme that quality scholars simply have left.

I pretty consistently hear from friends in DC that the quality of GOP hill staffers has plummeted. Gone are the days of nerdy policy wonks, replaced with young men whose primary political education came through 4chan and “own the libs” campus activism. It’s not just that the GOP isn’t sending their best, it’s that they’re running out of a “best” at all.

This is made worse by the collapse of Twitter into a fringe-right bubble. Twitter was never representative of the population in general, but it was the place to be if you were in politics, policy, or journalism. It’s where all of DC—and those who wanted to end up in DC—hung out. Given how Twitter, under Musk, has drifted right, and not just drifted right, but become overwhelmed with right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories, that’s further shaping the quality of conversations, interactions, connections, and information young conservatives are getting. And, because the structure of social media tricks us into believing our feed is more representative than it really is, they don’t have a sense of how malformed their social and intellectual environment is. At its worst, this can lead to living in a more-or-less alternate reality that bear little resemblance to the world in which public policy making happens.

The problem the GOP faces isn’t just that their quality is lower now, it’s that the pipeline for future talent is in pretty dire shape. To the extent MAGA remains in control of American conservatism—and future conservative policy analysts, lawmakers, regulators, writers, and staff received their political and policy education through MAGA sources, leaders, and communities—the competence gap between the GOP and the Democrats when it comes to the kind of knowledge necessary for effective policy-making will only widen.

MAGA has succeeded, to the degree its succeeded, because of Trump. When Trump’s no longer around, it’s not clear how today’s GOP can ever hope to convince many Americans it can effectively govern.