The Extraordinary Importance of Negative Feedback

Friends,

If you hadn’t noticed, Trump is failing.

Iran is more dangerous today than it was when went to war on it, and energy prices are far higher.

Trump’s brutal efforts to crackdown on undocumented people in the United States have generated a huge backlash, including among Latinos who voted for him in 2024 but are moving into the Democratic camp.

His attempt to cover up the Epstein files continues to rankle MAGA voters.

His $1.8 billion “slush” fund and family immunization from future IRS audits, in “settlement” of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, has drawn widespread bipartisan scorn and hit judicial roadblocks.

I could go on, but you get the point. Trump’s failures are mounting.

Why?

I’ve worked for three presidents and advised a fourth. All of them solicited honest feedback, including criticism.

Trump solicits only praise. He relishes compliments. He needs everyone around him to pander to his egomaniacal need for admiration. He punishes the bearers of bad news.

He promotes people who kiss his assets, such as Bill Pulte, the home-building heir Trump put in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and who Trump is now making acting director of national intelligence.

And Todd Blanche, the lawyer who represented him in his multiple lawsuits and who Trump now wants to become Attorney General.

Pulte, with no known experience in national security, got the job because he told Trump what Trump wanted to hear. He weaponized the housing agency and tried to dig up dirt on Trump enemies — specifically, the Fed’s Lisa Cook, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

As the person in charge of national intelligence, Pulte will continue to tell Trump whatever he wants to hear. Trump won’t get national intelligence; he’ll get national stupidity.

Trump has so many people “he could be listening to,” said a former Trump official, “and he listens to Pulte, who just continually f*cks things up.”

Blanche got the nod for Attorney General because he went even further than his predecessor, Pam Bondi, was willing to go in throwing integrity and principles odown the toilet in favor of going after Trump’s enemies. He secured a second felony indictment against the former FBI Director James Comey, alleging Comey threatened Trump ia a social media post that arranged seashells to spell “86 47.” Blanche also commenced a bonkers criminal investigation of Fed chief Jerome Powell, and tried to establish a $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump as well as immunity from I.R.S. audits as a fake “settlement” of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S.

So how does Trump make decisions if he doesn’t have people telling him the truth?

He relies, he has said, on his gut. “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” He told The Washington Post that he reaches decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already have], plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense.”

In other words, he doesn’t listen to anyone — especially not anyone who tells him anything he doesn’t want to hear.

Presto. He makes colossal mistakes.

Even normal people don’t like to get negative feedback. And most people don’t want to give it.

Yet receiving and giving truthful feedback are absolutely essential in a complex world.

If you have power over other people, it’s even more important to get negative feedback, because your mistakes could harm many others. Yet the more power you have, the less willing people are to give you negative feedback, since they have more reason to fear your reaction to it. Which means you have to go out of your way to solicit it.

The best leaders I’ve had the privilege of serving during my nearly 60 years of working life have been people who have actively sought and rewarded negative feedback.

Trump does just the opposite. Small wonder he’s one of the worst leaders the nation has ever endured.

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