The power of positive thinking meets the rule of law. [View all]

The January 6th hearings today illustrates for me again why it was always a terrible idea to elect a businessman to run the country "like a business".

There's a cult in corporate management culture which glorifies imagining a goal and then not letting anything get in the way of achieving that goal, certainly not facts. If you can dream it, you can do it. And that's exactly what Trump was doing - what his background trained him to do.

The self-evident problem is that facts are facts and the law is the law. And good government is usually about determining the least bad course of action on the basis of the best facts that can be mustered within the constraints of law and due process.

While Trump is his own whole self-contained bag of snakes, I think he also manifests a dangerous American cultural trend that prioritizes "vision" over living in a fact based reality.

Being good at government takes a lifetime of study and experience. We need to fight back harder against sneering attacks on the professionalism of the civil service and of career public servants.