The incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence

"I alone can fix it," he said.  And 63 million adults applauded and made him the leader.

He described himself as a "stable genius" and his supporters were thrilled with his reptilian cunning.

He is no physician, and yet he freely advises people, including experts, on what they should do.  During these COVID-19 times, he is practicing what he campaigned on--that he alone can fix it.

We have always known about confident idiots like him.  I blogged about the Dunning-Kruger effect more than 5 years ago--in November 2014.

[In] many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

"I alone can fix it."

Confident idiots spew bullshit all the time.

It is not an accident that I was drawn to Harry Franfurt's On Bullshit as soon as the tiny book was published.  Which is also why I loved Montaigne's Que sais-je?  Which is also why I developed a course that I offered only once, on intellectual humility.

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

But, 63 million loved the man who claimed to know it all!  And now we are all paying the price for his ignorance and incompetence.