Donald Trump’s failure is complete

| 5:53 pm EDT August 5, 2017
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

With so many prominent tenures already coming to an abrupt end in the Donald Trump administration, now seemed like an appropriate time to revisit my own initial expectations for each of the major players. I considered a write up which identified the advisers, cabinet members and visible staffers who have outperformed and underperformed my expectations. That’s when I realized something that should be statistically impossible, even for this administration: every single one of them has performed as poorly, or worse, than I was expecting. I can’t find one who’s been a pleasant surprise.

Much as the egotist in me wants to pat myself on the back for having correctly predicted that every one of them would individually fail, the math nerd in me knows it shouldn’t be possible. At least one of them should have succeeded, if only by accident. Some of them are sufficiently disconnected from the rest of the administration that they shouldn’t have automatically been dragged down with the tide. And yet everyone has managed to fail individually, while also failing as a team. It shouldn’t be that way. Just as on a team of well chosen solid hires, at least one of them should fail by accident. 100% success or 100% failure, across dozens of senior hires, is not a natural dispersion.

Statistically speaking, it’s difficult for this many quasi-independent variables to all fail across the board. Even if you randomly guess on every question on a multiple choice test, you’ll still score a 25%. That’s easy to pull off. But to score 0% you’d have to think you know every answer, and get every one of them wrong, which is trickier. And that’s where I suspect the explanation may lie.

If Donald Trump had lazily hired people without looking at their qualifications, or randomly hired acquaintances with no rhyme or reason, he’d have picked a few winners by accident. Instead his 0% success rate with his hires suggests that he has specific criteria for trying to hire people he thinks will be winners, and his criteria is so upside down that it’s resulted in all losers. If you think about it, that’s something of a remarkable feat.