Trump’s War on Meritocracy

Shortly after midnight, a few hours after the horrifying collision between an airplane and a helicopter at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump felt the time was right for a shocked nation to hear his insights into the tragedy. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”

While you might question the sophistication of his analysis, Trump was correct about both the physics of the collision (namely, that it could have been avoided if the helicopter had gone either up or down) and the moral valence of the mass casualty event (bad, not good).

But, by midday today, without the benefit of any important conclusions about the cause of the crash, Trump adopted a different perspective. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” he told reporters in a rambling press conference. His strong opinion was that the cause was a “diversity push” in the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring process.

Lest that comment be dismissed as the half-formed musings of a president reacting in real time to a developing event, a few hours later Trump doubled down. In a live broadcast from the Oval Office, he signed an executive order that, in the words of an off-camera Vice President J. D. Vance, pinned responsibility for the crash on “the Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”

The purpose of Trump’s wild finger-pointing appears to be twofold: first, to avoid taking any blame for a disaster; and second, to exploit the tragedy while it is in the public’s mind, using it to advance the notion that his administration is replacing favoritism toward minorities with pure, race-blind merit. “As you said in your inaugural, it is color-blind and merit-based,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, joining Trump at the press conference. “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air-traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

This was rich coming from a man who might be the least qualified secretary of defense in American history—a Cabinet official whose professional qualifications include mismanaging two small lobbying organizations and whose alleged history of drinking and mistreatment of women led his own sister-in-law to urge the Senate to reject his nomination, as it very nearly did.

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

And Hegseth is hardly an outlier. Trump has already done more to abandon the ideal of meritocracy than perhaps any presidential administration since the Progressive Era. He is going to war against the civil service system, which was established more than a century ago to ensure that federal jobs go to qualified civil servants, rather than as rewards for party hacks, as had been the case previously. Trump, who believes that non-partisan civil servants constitute a Deep State conspiracy against him, would rather lose their expertise than risk it being deployed in ways that thwart his personal ambitions.

He has gone even further in this direction in selecting his Cabinet. Every president tends to fill such roles with supporters, but Trump has elevated loyalty to an almost comical degree. Not only must Trump’s Cabinet officials have supported him in the election, they must endorse, or at least refuse to contradict, his infamously false claim to have won the 2020 election. The driving logic behind many of his most high-profile Cabinet picks appears to be a desire to find individuals who will stand behind the president if and when he violates norms, laws, or basic decency.

That is how Hegseth, despite his miserable record of management experience, was elevated to run the Pentagon. It is how Kash Patel, the author of a ridiculous children’s book portraying himself as a wizard and Trump as a king, was nominated to run the FBI. And it is how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has waged a pseudoscientific war against vaccines and appears to not know basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, was tapped to run the federal department that oversees those programs.

One problem with discussing Trump’s opinions on fast-moving matters like the plane crash is that, in the absence of a completed investigation, it’s impossible to say for sure what did cause the disaster. Investigators haven’t even determined which errors were made, let alone why they occurred. It is possible the entire fault rests with the helicopter pilot, as Trump himself suggested the night of the crash.

It’s true that the federal civil service has many problems, not least the extreme bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of both hiring qualified candidates and firing low-performing employees. It’s true, too, that the Federal Aviation Administration has been sued over  a clumsy program to boost minority representation.That effort arose out of an understandable desire to broaden the overwhelmingly white hiring pipeline for air traffic controllers, but is alleged to have included perverse hiring criteria that unfairly filtered out qualified applicants.

There is no evidence yet that the FAA, let alone its hiring practices, had any responsibility for the crash. But to the extent that Trump thinks the underlying issue is an insufficient focus on merit, his moves to purge the government of non-Trumpist civil servants is all but guaranteed to make the problem worse. When you are selecting not only for loyalty, but defining that loyalty to mean affirming morally odious values and factually absurd premises, you are reducing your hiring pool to the shallowest part.

[David A. Graham: Blind partisanship does not actually help Trump]

And to be sure, when loyalty itself is the job requirement, this makes a certain kind of sense. La Cosa Nostra does not recruit its members very widely, because, as with Trump, its fear of betrayal outweighs its interest in hiring and promoting the most skilled racketeers and leg-breakers. When you are trying to run a government along mafia hiring and promotion principles, you are necessarily forfeiting expertise and intelligence.

If Trump has his way, over the next four years, the political composition of the people engaged in directing air traffic, testing food for safety, preventing terrorism, and other vital public functions will change dramatically. The ones who have a serious problem with January 6 will be gone, replaced by people who are willing to repeat to Trump’s lies—if they are replaced at all. You can justify that process as the president’s prerogative to shape the executive branch. What you can’t call it is an elevation of merit.