You have to be nuts to want to be president, ever, and certainly now, and you also have to be a bit nuts to take on the responsibility (campaign manager, etc.) of running the campaign. Perhaps for this reason (and others) it is not often the case that the do-gooders in DC rise to the top, but the disturbed career climbers that seem to rise everywhere.
If you win a campaign you're a hero, and if you lose one you're, well, a loser, or at least you should be. People failing up is another feature of these work cultures. In tales of losing campaigns past (told by unreliable narrators with competing agendas), it isn't that people make some dumb choices - with hindsight they all look dumb in a losing campaign - it's the apparent thinking behind those choices that often makes my jaw drop.
The problem with the kinds of sociopathic mercenaries that tend to run things is that they're all pretty Trumpy, convinced of their own genius. Sure they're smarter than Trump. Jim Hoft is smarter than Trump. But the other feature of such supergeniuses is that being proved fucking right, with uniquely brilliant cunning plans, is too much of a motivator.
I suppose I'm vagueblogging a bit, here, but Jared Kushner isn't the only failchild with a fatal case of Dunning-Krueger syndrome, and gold-embossed certificates from schools near Boston attesting to their genius, running around DC.
The problem is that it's fatal to us.
