The following article by Nate Silver was posted on the fivethirtyeight website September 30, 2017:
His outburst on Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico shows that not everything is a clever ploy to rally his base.
But the theories are in conflict because they’re about the intent and motivation for Trump’s behavior and not necessarily its effects. The first theory says that Trump is calculating and rational; the second says that he’s impulsive and emotional. The first theory implies that Trump may be employing “racially charged” rhetoric and actions for political gain. The second implies that Trump himself may harbor degrees of racial resentment, and resentment toward women, and that it colors his response to news events. Either way, Trump’s actions could be politically effective or ineffective. (Trump’s approval rating declined slightly this week after his NFL comments, although it’s hard to know if they’re the reason why.) However, it seems important to know what motivates them. If Trump’s actions are driven by emotional outbursts more than calculated trollishness, that might predict a different response to how he deals with escalating tensions with North Korea, for example.
After Trump’s NFL remarks, you really could have argued either theory. In addition to the racial dynamics at play, Trump has some personal grievanceswith the NFL, including his failure to purchase an NFL franchise. But the protests from Kaepernick and others have been unpopular, and the response to them has been highly partisan. One can imagine Trump thinking it was effective politics to bring them up as a wedge issue, especially at a political rally in Alabama.
It’s much harder to describe some of Trump’s other outbursts — like those against the Khan family or Judge Curiel, for example — as representing a calculated political strategy. The same goes for Trump’s tweetstorm on Saturday morning about San Juan mayor C
armen Yulín Cruz, who had criticized the White House’s response to Hurricane Maria.
No matter how cynical one is, it’s hard to see what possible political benefit Trump could get from criticizing Cruz, whose city was devastated by Maria and remains largely without power and otherwise in crisis. Nor is the government’s response to Maria necessarily something that Trump wants to draw a lot of attention to. I’ve seen debates back and forth in the media over the past week about whether Trump’s response to Maria is analogous to the one former President George W. Bush had to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trump’s dismissiveness toward Cruz almost certainly won’t help his side of the argument; instead, it will amplify growing criticism about how the government handled Puerto Rico and why Trump seemed to be more interested in the NFL protests than in his administration’s hurricane recovery plan.
I’m happy to acknowledge that Trump’s responses to the news are sometimes thought-out and deliberate. His criticisms of the media often seem to fall into this category, for example, since they’re sure to get widespread coverage and Republican voters have overwhelmingly lost faith in the media.
But at many other times, journalists come up with overly convoluted explanations for Trump’s behavior (“This seemingly self-destructive emotional outburst is actually a clever political strategy!”) when simpler ones will suffice (“This is a self-destructive emotional outburst.”). In doing so, they violate both Ockham’s razor1 and Hanlon’s razor — the latter of which can be stated as “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” One can understand why journalists who rely on having close access to Trump avoid explanations that portray Trump as being irrational, incompetent or bigoted. But sometimes they’re the only explanations that make sense.
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