Are we witnessing the death of expertise? | On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti
Analyst Tom Nichols says the Trump administration is fundamentally incompetent. And he says there’s been a systematic erosion of expert trust for years — which is dangerous for American democracy.
Guests
Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic. Professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years.
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: We're a few days shy of one month of the U.S. and Israel's war against Iran. The war is projected to cost at least $30 billion by the end of this month. That's at least $1 billion every day, and that's only direct military costs. Then there are the much more massive costs to the global economy and the cost in lives.
At least 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed. Thousands of people around the region have also been killed, and there could be more than 6 million people who have been displaced. Now, what exactly is all this for?
(MONTAGE PLAYS)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.
PETE HEGSETH: We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.
REPORTER: Do you believe that some nuclear capability in Iran remains?
DAN CAINE: It would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.
TRUMP: It would be years before they could ever get going.
STEVE WITKOFF: They have 10,000 roughly kilograms of fissionable material. The 60% material can be brought to 90% — that's weapon grade – in roughly one week. There's almost no stopping them. They have an endless supply of it.
HEGSETH: When he says we obliterated their nuclear program, he's right, we did. We dropped those bombs exactly where they needed to be. Set them back. But that doesn't mean they've stopped their pursuit.
TRUMP: We're not gonna let them have nuclear weapons.
HEGSETH: You can't have a nuclear bomb. Radical Islamists can't have a nuclear bomb that they wield.
TRUMP: Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas.
MIKE JOHNSON: They have declared war on us. We're not at war right now.
HEGSETH: We didn't start this war. But under President Trump, we are finishing it.
MARCO RUBIO: We would love to see this regime be replaced.
HEGSETH: This is not a so-called regime change war.
TRUMP: Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were gonna attack first.
RUBIO: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.
TRUMP: If anything, I might have forced Israel's hand.
TRUMP: I don't think it's gonna be long. When it's over, this is gonna bounce right back so fast.
REPORTER: When are you gonna know when it's over?
TRUMP: When I feel it.
TRUMP: You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won. In the first hour, it was over.
TRUMP: We don't wanna leave too early, do we? Huh? We gotta finish the job, right?! (APPLAUSE)
CHAKRABARTI: So that is, of course, President Donald Trump. You also heard Secretary of State Marco Rubio, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, negotiator Steve Witkoff and others. Just over the past several weeks. Now the unpredictability of the President of the United States is leading to a war being fought on one man's whim.
Other presidents have had irrational impulses. Let's be clear about that. But the United States government used to operate with the presumption that a close cadre of experts would surround the President to provide factual analysis, reasoned pushback, and knowledgeable guidance to the commander in chief.
That is gone from the White House now, or at least evidence of expertise is getting much, much harder to find in how the executive branch makes its decisions. I want to say that this isn't a sudden development under President Trump.
It's actually the result of decades of political opportunism disguised as anti-elitism that has corroded the value of expertise in American political culture, so that's why we wanted to bring Tom Nichols back on the show today. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College where he taught for 25 years. He's also the author of several books, including Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy and The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Tom, welcome back to On Point.
TOM NICHOLS: Thanks Meghna. It's good to be back with you.
CHAKRABARTI: We wanted to make that assembly of contradictory statements from various members of the administration. Because most people probably heard them here and there like a cloud, but when you hear them one after the other, it really drives home the point that it's hard to make sense at all of what is going on in the White House.
What did you hear in that montage of takes from the executive?
NICHOLS: What I heard is the president for his own vain glory and his own arrogance, that he knows better than any other living human being, has decided to go to war against a country of 92 million people.
And he thought it was going to be quick and easy and a one and done, and the regime would fall and he would be the liberator of Iran, and there would be statues to him in Tehran. And you can see this. He certainly expects that kind of glory in Venezuela. He's expecting it again in Cuba.
And let me back up for a moment and say, as everyone does, if the Iranian regime falls, no one will shed any tears. And if Trump can pull that off, he's certainly going to get some of the credit for eradicating a regime that I've referred to as a malignancy.
But as two of my colleagues wrote a great piece last week in The Atlantic where they pointed out that at this point, we are up to 10 different rationales for this war that go all the way from regime change to nuclear weapons, to terrorism, to they're just generally bad people.
And they deserve to be driven from power. And I think he, the president, didn't think this through. I think other people around him may have. But in this administration, you're either on board or you're out the door. And here we are with a war that the president was determined to begin probably with some nudging from the Israelis, from the Prime Minister of Israel.
The president didn't think [the Iran war] through. I think other people around him may have. But in this administration, you're either on board or you're out the door.
But without any clear way to finish it.
CHAKRABARTI: Let me ask you, who do you think around the president might have had a clearer sense or better planning than he did himself.
NICHOLS: Oh, I'm sure the military spoke up and said, here are the things we can do, Mr. President. Here are the targets we can destroy.
Here are the operations we can conduct. However, the political ramifications are things that you have to think about because we can't run the war. We need to do this according to what you want done. And I think when he was probably told we can't get all of that fissile material.
I don't know what, I think it was Witkoff. In your montage who said 10,000 kilograms, that's 20,000 pounds of uranium. I'm pretty sure that's not right. And probably someone said, we're not going to get all of that. The regime might not fall. The Strait of Hormuz is probably going to be closed.
I suspect what happened, and from, I've heard this, similar stories from people that have tried to brief him that he just waved it away and said no, it's not going to be a problem, we'll take care of that. Because he is basically unbriefable. He just does not sit back and listen and process the way other presidents do.
Presidents have pretty strong feelings about what they want done, but typically they sit back, they listen, they take it in. Donald Trump kind of wish casts. He just tries to will things into reality. No. It'll be fine. They'll capitulate. The Strait won't be a problem, et cetera, et cetera.
CHAKRABARTI: So obviously the president is at the center of this. And this particular president more so than ever, but how would you evaluate the expertise in the members of the cabinet who surround him in comparison to other presidents during wartime?
NICHOLS: There just isn't any. This is the weakest cabinet in modern American history.
Most of these people have no business being in national politics. The Secretary of Defense, the one guy that you would think along with the Secretary of State is going to kind of huddle with the president. And say, look, this is a pretty dangerous thing. Normally, for example, if you look back at Barack Obama hemming and hawing and backing and forthing about whether to strike Syria, the people involved were the Secretary of State.
You had the Secretary of Defense involved. You had the chief of staff who turns out to have been instrumental in pulling Obama away from striking Syria. Who are the people that are going to take a walk with the president on the South lawn the way Denis McDonough did with Barack Obama?
Susie Wiles? That's not going to happen. Pete Hegseth has no idea what he's doing. He's manifestly unqualified for his job. He's a talk show host who's deeply in over his head. Marco Rubio, a perfectly plausible Secretary of State, lot of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But he's also the National Security Advisor.
Which hasn't happened since Henry Kissinger, and frankly, that didn't go so well the last time. Someone dual-hatted themselves this way. Tulsi Gabbard, absolutely unqualified to be director of National Intelligence. All of them are, at this point, not only do they lack expertise, they lack courage, they lack conviction, and they're all just trying to hang onto their jobs.
CHAKRABARTI: And so we're going to spend the rest of the hour, Tom, talking about the consequences of this draining of expertise. But what do you think the consequence is first and foremost on the American people?
NICHOLS: The draining of expertise from the national government means people are going to die, whether they are in combat and being sent to try to spackle over the problems that Donald Trump left by waving away the consequences of a war of choice whether it's people who refuse to take vaccines because Robert F. Kennedy, I can't believe, in the same way that I have trouble saying Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. I almost can't get my head around Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The draining of expertise from the national government means people are going to die.
But people are going to lose jobs. People are going to suffer economically. I think it's easy to dismiss expertise in the government because most of the time the effect of expertise on your life as an American citizen is more or less invisible. Things just work. Things just go, the lights go on, airplanes fly, oil gets delivered and so on. But I think what we're seeing now is the collapse of government, of expertise in the government is much Hemingway once said about going bankrupt. How do you go bankrupt? Gradually, and then all at once.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: Tom, earlier you had said this is the weakest cabinet in American history. And what I'd like to spend some time doing is we've collected some statements from various members of the cabinet.
And I just want to go through them with you one by one, because usually on this show when we're covering issues, we're talking about sort of one agency in particular. But I think it's really instructive to hear them all together. Because the whole picture really tells us where we are as a country.
And let me start with something that's very much on the minds of Americans right now, Americans who travel on an airplane. And that is the fact that the TSA, because of the lack of funding for DHS, the TSA has not had funding for a while, and which is causing huge backups at airports like Philadelphia. Atlanta, Washington, D.C., et cetera, et cetera. Just this weekend the president said, Hey, let's send ICE agents in to cover for TSA agents who can't come or won't come to work, because they're not getting paid. Well, here's transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. He was on ABC just this weekend. He was asked about the president's plan to put ICE agents in airports.
SEAN DUFFY: I would say that one of the leverage points that Iran has is trying to drive up the price of oil. It's leverage. Democrats want to see long lines at airports as leverage. President Trump's trying to take that leverage away and not make the American people suffer. So TSA agents are law enforcement. They know how to pat people down. They know how to run the x-ray machines because they are, again, under Homeland Security with TSA. So if we can bring in other assets and tools to assist TSA to get rid of these lines. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And the president's looking around every corner to make sure the American people don't suffer during the shutdown.
CHAKRABARTI: Now, Tom, when he says, when Duffy says they know how to pat people down, they know how to run the X-ray machines. He's actually referring to ICE there, saying they are under Homeland Security with TSA. I have a lot of thoughts about how to read that part of Duffy's statement, but I just want to turn to you first.
NICHOLS: First, one of the things that always happens to expertise in an authoritarian situation. We live in a free country and thank God for it. But the President runs the White House very much like an authoritarian regime, an authoritarian hot house. And so the key to survival is never to contradict the leader.
And so Duffy, who I assume, and others, the TSA Union, by the way, has also said this is ridiculous. Duffy has to come up with some kind of cockamamie rationale. I think given what we saw in Minnesota, the last thing you want is a bunch of ICE guys wandering around, patting down your grandma and your kids as they're trying to get on an airplane.
What's also going on here, and I think people need to be aware of this, Trump has been looking for some institution in American government that will be his personal muscle. He tried to do it with the military and that didn't work out well. His attempt to militarize the streets really ended up fizzling out.
ICE, however, does not have the traditions and the history of the U.S. military and he clearly wants to turn them into some sort of paramilitary rapid reaction force that he can send anywhere at will, and this is probably a good opportunity for him to prove that. It's just dumb. It makes no sense. ICE will probably be in the way more than they're going to help. They're not trained for this. As I said, as the TSA Union had said, listen, we trained for a long time and we bring a lot of experience to this. I've been a critic of security theater at airports, but if you're going to have anybody do it, have the people that are civilians who are trained.
Sending in immigration cops, is again, just a flex. It's meant to intimidate people by putting guys in face masks and weapons roaming around airports. It's gonna make things worse.
CHAKRABARTI: So it's the part for me where Duffy says, they, being ICE, know how to run the X-ray machines because they are, again, under Homeland Security with TSA, this gets right to what you wrote about in your book, that it's just an utterly ignorant thing for Duffy to say, because as you pointed out, ICE training is nowhere near what TSA training is. And the idea that an ICE agent could sit down at one of those X-ray machines, look at what's passing in front of him on a screen and be able to understand what's the difference between a suspect material versus not, it just, it defies belief.
The ICE agents themselves are barely trained to do their own jobs, as we've been learning over the past few months. But the fact that the Secretary of Transportation can utter a phrase like that, what does it tell you about his own knowledge of what kind of expertise it takes to run aspects of airport security?
NICHOLS: We have no clue. First of all, I doubt Sean Duffy, again, there's no evidence that Sean Duffy is qualified to be a member of the cabinet. But it tells you, even if he knew about these issues, it won't matter. Because in this cabinet, the most important thing is to always say that Donald Trump is right.
If Donald Trump said, we're going to take the Federal Health Service. And because doctors know how to pat people down and examine them and we're going to send 10,000 guys in white jackets, Sean Duffy's answer would be a masterful plan. Because that is the culture of this administration, and that is why authoritarian leaders hate experts.
Authoritarian leaders hate experts.
Because experts are always the people in the room who raise their hand and say, I know you wish that it would happen that way, but there are things like the laws of physics, history, experience, that tell you it's not going to happen that way. And people like Donald Trump hate being told that stuff because their approach to everything is to say, if I say it, it will happen.
Like with tariffs, you could think of a dozen other issues. Tariffs. Oh
