Trump Falls for GSF4

It would appear that Donald Trump is channeling his inner geek for the Senate confitmation hearings for his cabinet nomniees -- despite so many of them being unqualified (Hegseth) or worse (Kennedy).

For those who don't know what GSF4 is, it isn't some quack remedy slipped to him by Dr. Oz, or RFK, Jr., or some other nominee.

No, it's Geek Social Fallacy #4:

Friendship Is Transitive

...GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they're not, something is Very Wrong.

The milder form of GSF4 merely prevents the carrier from perceiving evidence to contradict it; a carrier will refuse to comprehend that two of their friends (or two groups of friends) don't much care for each other, and will continue to try to bring them together at social events. They may even maintain that a full-scale vendetta is just a misunderstanding between friends that could easily be resolved if the principals would just sit down to talk it out.

A more serious form of GSF4 becomes another "friendship test" fallacy: if you have a friend A, and a friend B, but A & B are not friends, then one of them must not really be your friend at all. It is surprisingly common for a carrier, when faced with two friends who don't get along, to simply drop one of them.

...

GSF4 can also lead carriers to make inappropriate requests of people they barely know -- asking a friend's roommate's ex if they can crash on their couch, asking a college acquaintance from eight years ago for a letter of recommendation at their workplace, and so on. If something is appropriate to ask of a friend, it's appropriate to ask of a friend of a friend. [bold added]

... or asking his GOP friends in the Senate not to do their job so he can wholesale reward blind loyalty without regard for any possible consequences.

I never imagined I'd use Donald Trump and Geek in the same sentence, but here we are.

I'm not a psychologist; I have no idea if the resemblance reflects similar underlying causes, but it should be obvious to just about anyone that just because two people have R's behind their names -- or support Trump -- doesn't mean they will (or should) necessarily like each other.

Pretending otherwise, like Trump is doing -- or all the people before him who blame "polarization" for all our nation's problems -- is a recipe for great difficulty, because (1) people often honestly disagree about things, such as when one or both are wrong, and (2) people have different priorities.

Disagreement about facts and priorities frequently means that people can't be friends, although it doesn't have to. Conversely, being friends doesn't mean pretending to agree. We have a saying about that for good reason: It takes a real friend to tell you the truth, even when you don't want to hear it.

I am no psychologist, but I am a geek, and I can tell you that a great way to screw yourself out of friends -- and a quick path to the truth when you're wrong -- is to not listen to them, and to drop them like hot potatoes if they aren't all buddies with each other.

For abandoning friends, look at all the people from Trump's first term who aren't around now. For not listening to friends -- and stressing friendships by making inappropriate requests, we're seeing that now.

Rather than vet his nominees for later, and in the meantime building support for his policies, Trump is wasting time, effort, and political capital jawboning Senators about nominees who are being de facto vetted at full volume by the news media:

Next up was Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host known for his opposition to women in combat roles and his war on "woke" generals. Trump proposed Hegseth for secretary of Defense, a job that entails managing almost 3 million people and an $849-billion budget, even though he had never run anything remotely comparable.

At first, the National Guard veteran looked headed for confirmation, as GOP senators fell into line. Then a whistleblower told Trump aides that a woman had accused Hegseth of raping her in a Monterey hotel in 2017, and the story promptly leaked. (Hegseth said the encounter was consensual.) Two days later, it emerged that Hegseth had paid the accuser in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement. [links omitted]

Since then, Trump almost changed to a more palatable nominee, but then doubled down on Hegseth.

"His confirmation hearings are going to be completely brutal," a Republican strategist warned. "There will be weeks of coverage on cable TV, which is a medium Trump cares about. How much stomach does he have for that when he's about to take office?"

And later:

By proposing so many nominees with flagrantly weak qualifications beyond political loyalty, he has turned their confirmations into zero-sum tests of his ability to compel obedience from prideful senators. With only a 53-47 majority in the chamber, the loss of any four could mean defeat.

As the piece indicates, Trump has traded a quiet vetting process for having each nominee dragged through the mud, with Matt Gaetz and Hegseth cuing the media to the happy hunting ground for scandal that might await.

If the Senate has any backbone at all, and wants any meaningful power of its own going forward, it will also know to do its due diligence, conceivably causing it to turn down other nominees that might have sailed through, but hopefully causing it to live up to its truth-telling role as the President's and America's friend.

I would go further: Given the relatively narrow margin of GOP control of the Senate, I am concerned that a couple of good nominees with policy positions that are not as popular as they should be are at higher risk of being shot down than they should be.

So, because Trump seems to think that anyone he likes should also be liked by the Senate, he is losing political capital, making himself look ridiculous, and potentially losing good cabinet nominees.

-- CAV