Lugar, who has been gone now for almost seven years and whose wisdom is sorely missed on both the national and world stages, always was careful with his words. He took a long pause before answering my question.
“This president,” he said, then paused again before continuing with, “is not a student.”
Those six words coming out of almost anyone else’s mouth would not have been taken as anything more than the mildest of criticisms.
But, coming from Lugar—who from earliest days devoted himself to learning, knowing and understanding everything he could—it was a devastating critique, perhaps the harshest assessment of another human being I ever heard him utter.
Because what Lugar was saying with those six words was that Trump didn’t care whether he was right or wrong and couldn’t summon the personal discipline necessary to be good at anything.
This president, Lugar might as well have been saying, thought ignorance and knowledge should be accorded equal respect and that there was no difference between competence and incompetence.
Lugar’s judgment of Trump was on point.
Now, nearly a decade of tumult and turmoil later, we have a president of the United States who is flailing his way through a catastrophe of his own making in Iran. He is trapped in what now threatens to be a slow-motion economic and foreign-policy train wreck because he isn’t a student.
He and his equally feckless Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ignored the counsel of generals and experts on the Middle East before launching the attack on Iran. Trump and Hegseth both thought they knew better than the people who had studied war and a complicated part of the world for all their working lives.
That was on brand for Trump.
In his first term, he—the trust-fund baby who ducked military service in the Vietnam War because of supposed “bone spurs” in his heels—boasted that he knew more about military matters than generals and admirals did. He claimed he understood regions of the globe he’d never visited or even read about better than analysts and scholars who had been studying them for decades.
Trump’s assertion that his ignorance should be granted equal or even greater respect than someone else’s expertise is a product of one of certain populists’ misreadings and misunderstandings of the nature of the grand American experiment.
The founders, however blind they were to the barriers and inequities created by slavery and misogyny, said they wanted to build a society based on equality of opportunity. Thomas Jefferson, the voice of the American Revolution, argued that he wanted to create an arena in which truth and falsehood could joust because he was convinced that, over time, truth would prevail.
The founders’ point was that everyone’s ideas should be considered, so that the best and wisest ones could come out on top.
It proved easy to twist that core principle into a misperception that all ideas, regardless of their truth or falsity, have equal value.
And that not knowing or not being good at something is just the same as knowing or being skilled.
We’re seeing now the fatal flaw in that strain of populism.
Trump and Hegseth do not know war better than the generals and the admirals, but because the cocksure president and his bellicose secretary of defense thought they did—thought that their ignorance was better than the military leaders’ expertise—we’re now stuck in a war without an easy exit while price increases tied to a choked-off oil supply jump and jitter their way through the world’s economy.
This war with Iran now is shaping up to be an epic mistake, one that will affect life in the United States and elsewhere for decades to come.
The only good thing about mistakes is that they can serve as teaching tools. People are supposed to learn from them.
Donald Trump, though, likely won’t learn anything from this debacle of his own doing.
Because, as Richard Lugar said, “this president is not a student.”
The question that remains is whether the rest of us are.
Or will learn to be.
