Trump's Personnel Decision Says a Lot About Trump
On This Day In 2019
The four pillars of OTDI are His Policies, His Lies, His Staffers, His Impact. Presidents reveal their leadership qualities when they unveil their picks to fill cabinet positions and serve as chief advisors. Today we’ll talk a bit about one of those staffers, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, because inside observers freely questioned his basic intelligence in a way that’s unusual for a public servant.
A report in Politico in 2011 was titled “Is Rick Perry Dumb?” It recounted the views of many who had watched him serve as Texas governor for 12 years. For example, Dave McNeely, a political columnist who had covered Austin since 1963, noted: “In terms of sheer brains and understanding policy at a deep level, he’d rank pretty low.”
Perry ran for president in the 2012 cycle. However, while on the stump, he appeared not to know that the voting age is 21, not 18. But maybe that didn’t matter, because it seemed he also didn’t even know when election day was.
His debate performances were so bad that Business Insider felt compelled to run a story called “OOF: Rick Perry's 5 Dumbest Debate Moments.”
And that came before Perry’s most-infamous moment: At the next GOP debate, he was unable to name all three federal agencies he hoped to eliminate as president. “Oops,” he famously said on stage…and then dropped out shortly thereafter.
So a painful poll revealed that the third-most common word which comes to mind when people think of Rick Perry is “idiot.”
When he ran again in ’16, Trump sided with “Team Dumb.” During one of the GOP debates, Trump accused Perry of wearing glasses “so people will think he’s smart.”
Politico did add nuance to that earlier evaluation, noting that as governor he was top-notch at understanding what it takes to be a successful politician: “Conversations with both Perry admirers and critics reveal a more complicated assessment about the mind of a politician who has never lost an election — and ranks as the longest-serving governor in Texas history.” Even Dave McNeely added: “as far as power politics and control, he’s the most powerful Texas governor in history.” And as Slate noted, if you’ve been in a governor’s office as long as Perry was, you’re bound to have at least some good proposals.
But there were also questions about his policy-making strengths as Secretary. OTDI 2019 Perry was asked by CNBC whether he believed that carbon dioxide (CO2) was the main driver of climate change. “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in,” he replied. (He wasn’t the first Trump cabinet secretary to make that argument. EPA head Scott Pruitt had said the same thing on the same show a couple of months earlier.) There may be multiple “control knobs,” but to gloss over the role of carbon dioxide and humanity’s contributions to its rising levels is worrisome, either for its ignorance or its anti-science bias.
And it’s also his mendacity. Paul Waldman explained about an earlier situation: “Texas governor Rick Perry was, as they say down in the Lone Star state, dumb as a stump. But Perry has been working hard to convince Americans that he's also mean as a scorpion… With the highest proportion of uninsured residents of any state in the union, Perry gleefully declined the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), leaving millions of Texans without access to medical care despite the fact that the federal government would have picked up nearly all of the tab. And now, he's taking the nationwide Republican effort to destroy women's reproductive rights into new realms of vindictiveness."
At least one of his policy choices while he served in Trump’s cabinet was well-regarded. But the way Foreign Policy phrased it was telling: “Not even Rick Perry is stupid enough to resume testing nuclear weapons.”
Of course we’ve never met Perry; we just see these multiple reporters over many years who have raised these issues about him. Those we know who have met him and worked with him directly report favorably upon him on multiple levels; and obviously an up-close view will give a better perch from which to evaluate somebody, so those views are respected.
But still, here’s the point: None of this chatter stopped Trump from making Perry a Cabinet secretary and 15th in line to the presidency. Trump even appointed him to lead the agency he had once aimed to obliterate.
It was rumored, btw, that Perry misunderstood what the “Energy Department” does when he tried to shutter it…and he still didn’t know at the time he accepted Trump’s offer to run it. So, as the NYT noted, Perry “would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.”
Apparently Trump couldn’t find anybody better in the entire GOP willing to work with him in this position. Obama, by comparison, had appointed a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to that same advisory position. We think that says a lot, both about Trump's leadership and about the GOP’s “bench strength.”
Dive Deeper
Business Insider discusses the poll and his debate performances
Slate makes the case that Perry “is not an idiot."
Perry errs on the campaign trail
American Prospect analyzed his policy decisions as governor
Trump's glasses quote
CNBC reports on Perry’s climate claims
FP on his nuclear policy
The NYT on Perry’s understanding of the Energy Department