“Oh my God we dropped our son at college and our dog is dead.” -- Anne.

Anne is my wife. You’d like her.

She said this one Sunday in 2021 while we were reading in the living room.

There are at least two kinds of living room declarations. The first -- of which this is not an example-- punctuates a tense domestic exchan…

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Welcome to Navel Gazing.

I’m John Dickerson

We start this second episode of Season one as we have every episode in its long history, with a written notebook entry:

Notebook 75. Page 6, September 2021:

“They chose you.”

This entry greeted me when I opened my Field Notes notebook on the living room Sunday …

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We’re two episodes in an I’m grateful for all of the feedback from those of you out there in the Navel Gazing corps. We’ll rummage in the mail bag at the end of this episode, but for now, let’s follow what the notebook has to tell us for this period of time that we’ve got under the mi…

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Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode four of Navel Gazing. Season One

I’m John Dickerson

The entry that starts today’s episode is:

1016

It’s from Notebook 75, p. 8, September 2021

That’s it: 1016.

And we thank you for listening. On our next episode, four random letters read aloud…

I kid.

This entry is found in the tight terrain of just a fe…

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“The day does not have to begin with a head dunk in the bilge pump. 8:40 and I still have not looked at Twitter.”

—Notebook 35, April 17, 2017

Hello again. We’re back on the terrain of attention where Season Two of Navel Gazing started. Those of you who listened to Episode One will recognize this notebook entry as an early attempt to preserve the start of the day. Defending the morning. Nine years ago, that meant trying to resist Twitter. The bilge pump.

Those of you who are of a seafaring nature are no doubt doubled over on the poop deck because you understand that a bilge pump is the mechanism that pumps water out of the bilge; you don’t and can’t dunk your head in the pump. You dunk your head into the bilge or into bilge water. We apologize for the offense this caused.

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The morning reading didn’t come into focus, despite the volume of material. But some out of context quotes for you in the hopes that looking at them this way will squeeze some meaning out of them for me:

“the fact of a woman traveling alone had created a tense solicitousness that felt to her like hatred.” -- Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson

“human nature is weak, and the kindly support and wise advice of one whom we trust often enables us to accept more perfectly what we already know and see in an obscure way.” -- Spiritual Direction and Meditation, Thomas Merton

This did kick up something. I was interviewing a priest recently about the questions people ask him. (I’m big into questions these days). He said people don’t actually want answers. They just want him to be there while they come up with their own answer.

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We have a CIA officer, two young soldiers, a priest. In the Philippines. I am reading Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, the author of Train Dreams. How did I miss this book when it came out in 2007, when it won the National Book Award? I was covering the campaign I guess. I’m only 93 pages in but the novel is working on me. I’m not fully sure how.

I’m also not sure what’s going on. That’s part of the art of the novel, I think. To make you feel confused. That’s brave. I’m a writer who wants to make sure the reader has stepped on every cobblestone and is wearing the appropriate shoes in order to be on the pathway to the pleasing conclusion of the story or argument. (The Aristocrats!) No confusion allowed. But that’s limiting. It’s brave to resist that urge for certainty. To make uncertainty a character in the novel, as I suspect it will be in Tree of Smoke. To restrain, leave things out. To risk some reader misunderstanding. Maybe you don’t want your acclaim to be too universal, or that’s a sign that you haven’t risked enough to create something lasting and that changes a reader from the inside. You want confused Goodreads reviews!

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“But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.”

— Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

After I finished reading Crime and Punishment I felt like I’d been released from jail. The book is close, hot, oily, stuffy. There is no shortage of shouting.

I thought I wouldn’t post today. I had theories, but who doesn’t. Since the book is about what hot takes can do to you, I thought I’d leave mine aside.

Anne made a lovely savory breakfast. We sat on the porch coming up with theories about the mushrooms growing out of our marble tabletop.

But then I picked up Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace to finish my morning reading and here I am.

Gravity and Grace starts out opaque as a breakfast plate.

“Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.”

Should I run early in the day today or later in the day?

I keep going. Weil’s point is that the soul is governed by gravity-like forces. Much of what we do happens almost mechanically. Pain produces anger. Humiliation seeks compensation. Suffering looks for somewhere else to go. Even when we do virtuous things, the energy can come from vanity, rivalry or some other base passion.

The reasoning becomes clearer after a few more paragraphs:

“The source of man’s moral energy is outside him, like that of physical energy.”

Grace. Great. But how does it work, Simone?

Like “a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light.” Plants don’t manufacture light. Chlorophyll allows them to receive light and turn it into life.

For those who wish to be good, the central task, she is arguing, isn’t manufacturing goodness through heroic exertion. It’s developing the capacity to receive grace.

The main character in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, is consumed by a theory of the world in which his reason is in total control. We spend 500 pages watching him wrestle with that theory and fail. Lots of other shouty things happen along the way. Even near the end, after Raskolnikov has confessed and gone to prison, he still doesn’t really believe the crime was his great failure. His failure was that he couldn’t commit it and move on.

He’s been brought low by his failure to crime.

Then something happens that he doesn’t reason himself into.

A character who has spent the novel irritated by other people and bewildered by their affection for him finally allows himself to love Sonia. “How it happened he did not know.” He falls at her feet and weeps.

That evening, Sonya’s New Testament appears under his pillow. (A little much Fyodor, but I still love you.) He doesn’t open it. Instead, he wonders whether Sonia’s convictions, her feelings, her aspirations might somehow become his.

He doesn’t know. Something has happened to him that he didn’t reason himself into. And he doesn’t have a hot take. Or, Dostoevsky, in an act of beautiful artistic restraint, denies us one. (Which is why we forgive him the New Testament under the pillow.)

Life had stepped into the place of theory.

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I am peculiar. Do I mean particular? 1 Notebooks, sharpened pencils, old books with marginalia. It’s probably performative. On the other hand, if I knew how to make furniture, I wouldn’t consider the woodshop performative. What I actually believe is that these rituals (What, no burning of sage bundles?!) slow me down to the pace of understanding. Not to a better understanding than anyone else who lives a more normal life. It’s simply my process for converting exterior knowledge into intuition.

I’ve been pasting the word intuition all over the last few days since I came across it on a website devoted to explaining the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process—POMDP to the kids at the skate park—which I have been studying. The website starts this way: “This is a tutorial aimed at trying to build up the intuition behind solution procedures for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs).” I like that idea, “building up intuition.” That’s one of the ways we distinguish between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge flies away. Understanding becomes intuitive.

I spent an hour trying to explain the bond market in writing yesterday. (You’re welcome for the hot, steamy discussion topic for your Friday-night cocktail hour.) But I’m not sure I turned it into intuitive knowledge. (I’ve had to teach myself how the bond market works in one form or another since 1995.) These Notes posts on Substack exist to help me make ideas intuitive—explaining locks in learning—but the process doesn’t stop there. I have to do some number of things some number of times before it becomes truly intuitive. I’m not sure how many more.

Fragile: New information makes sense while the notes are visible.
Usable: You can reconstruct the explanation without them.
Intuitive: You can apply the mechanism to an unfamiliar case and anticipate what happens next.

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If you start your day reading Crime and Punishment, Dorothy Parker’s book reviews and Scientific American, you could be mistaken for apt. This is not apt. Unless we mean apt to confusion, interiority and the gasping need for another cup of coffee.

It was the Scientific American that really socked me. Quantum physics—the rules governing the very small, where a particle can be in several states at once until someone looks, behaves like a wave when it feels like it, and seems to know what its distant twin is doing—is confusing and not well explained.

I once interviewed Carlo Rovelli, the physicist about one of his books and I felt like I had become a kind of physics experiment measuring the smallest unit of understanding in a conversation by a person who by all external observations seems to be participating in the conversation.

The U.S. economy produced more jobs in August than expected. Economist Jason Furman pointed out on the Gabfest yesterday that we don’t talk about the unemployment picture because it’s quite good. Instead we talk about gas prices.

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I just passed Anne on the stairs as she headed down to her first floor office to work. We’re back to vertical living for a bit.

The Iran war keeps reminding us what bombing can’t do, while the Secretary of Defense reshapes the military in the image of the mindset learning its limitations in Iran. He’s reordered its culture around ten directives from a stage at Quantico, rebuilt its buying around a single word—speed, which he used 25 times in one speech—and ordered a “ruthless” review of the military’s lawyers with the instruction “no more moral ambiguity.” Is Iran proving that mindset to be a mistake, (not every problem is a nail despite what the hammer thinks?) or are the lessons of Iran the president’s to own, since he made the choices? (Author quotes self answering that question).

Six months ago, when Hegseth was two weeks into calling himself the Secretary of War, I asked a question: “What happens when decisive violence as a tool of strategy outruns the strategy it is supposed to serve?” The Iran war is answering it. I wrote then, "Eisenhower's question wasn't whether Patton was effective, it was who was holding the leash."

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I can feel the ghost particles moving through me since I read a piece in Live Science yesterday. An estimated 100 trillion neutrinos—known as “ghost particles”—pass through your body every second. This information escapes my capacity to understand it. Neutrinos are nearly massless, electrically neutral subatomic particles produced by nuclear activity—most of the ones passing through us come from the fusion powering the sun. They are called ghosts because they almost never interact with ordinary matter: they pass through your body, and even through the Earth, as though neither were there. Perhaps only one will interact with an atom in your body during your entire lifetime.

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This morning has a lot of faces. At six it looks like the fires of Mordor are burning but by 7:30 there’s mist in the valley. No deer today.

My mother-in-law told me that at church yesterday they were talking about Dolly Parton. Dolly grew up in the adjacent county. A little more than a half hour from where the church was in which she was being discussed. After the readings the kids gather on the steps of the altar. “A very famous East Tennessee lady named Dolly Parton died,” started the spiritual teacher who has the delicate job of talking to the kids in front of a congregation of adults. “People of your generation know her as the book lady,” she explained, locating the subject of her talk: Parton’s sweeping generosity. A few more sentences joined the world and then a child reached for the microphone to interrupt. “Not only was she generous,” said the young girl, clear and loud, “but she thought that being a billionaire was an actual failure.”

Nice work Dolly.

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“Inside me, I quickly come to the barrier, the limit of what I am, beyond which I cannot go by myself. It is such a narrow limit and yet for years I thought it was the universe. Now I see it is nothing. Shall I go on being content with this restriction? If I never become anything but a writer, that is what it will amount to—sitting on my own desert island which is not much bigger than an English penny. Desire always what is beyond and all around you, you poor sap! Want to progress and escape and expand and be emptied and vanish into God.

How quickly my limits accuse me of my nothingness and I cannot go beyond. I pause and reflect and reflection makes it more final. Then I forget to reflect any more and by surprise I make a little escape, at least to the threshold, and love moves in darkness, just enough to tell me that there is such a thing as freedom.”

-Thomas Merton, journal entry, 1949. Exact volume and page require the photographed book’s title and copyright pages.

“If you ran away, you’d come back to yourself.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett, Part VI, Chapter II.

“Take care! I don’t care. Don’t you worry about me! I am as happy now as I have ever been, and that is saying a great deal. But the time has come. I am being swept off my feet at last,” he added, and then in a low voice, as if to himself, he sang softly in the dark.

--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party,” p. 36 in the photographed edition.

I resisted picking these three because they’re so connected it would feel constructed which isn’t really the point. But who can tell what powers shape our ends. So:

I like Merton because it is the most intimate. Not surprising. It’s from his journal. Essentially we’re watching grace and the Holy Spirit work. Merton is fretting, as he does a lot in the journals, and just when he’s given up, he gets a vision of the thing he most wants. You’re not in control of it, Tom. (Or Louis) Instead: surrender, love, self-emptying. All bigger than an English penny.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov isn’t in charge either. Changing your location does not change the self you bring with you. You can run from circumstances, consequences, or other people, but eventually you “come back to yourself.” Geography cannot accomplish an inward transformation.

Bilbo does change his geography, though, and it’s a huge success. That passage comes just after he leaves the Ring behind. But he’s not merely shifting geography. He has relinquished the hold of power, control, and predictability. “The Road goes ever on and on,” he sings. The final lines are: “Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.” He is surrendering to the Road—to uncertainty, encounter, and a larger story he cannot control.

None of these passages is really about escape. They are about the limits of self-propulsion. Merton reaches the edge of himself and cannot force his way through. Porfiry tells Raskolnikov that no distance will carry him beyond himself. Bilbo, having put down the Ring, is finally light enough to be swept off his feet. You cannot think, run, or command your way into freedom. The grip has to loosen before something larger—grace, conscience, the Road—can be encountered.

Hello everyone. I like to think you are indefatigable.1

Thank you for joining this week and welcome to all our new subscribers. I will continue the morning reading experiment next week. And thank you to those of you who have signed up for paid subscriptions.

Here’s a review of some experiments and traditional work this week in case you missed any of it:

This week I wrote about the presidency and the Iran war, reflected briefly on our love of Dollywood and examined the mounting bottlenecks created by artificial intelligence. On the Gabfest we discussed the Supreme Court ruling on mail ballots, the U.S. trade war with Canada, and AI security in “Please Do Not Ruin the Post Office”.

I also tried a few experiments inspired by my morning reading: Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.

“The Morning Ballet” wasn’t an experiment at all, but visual proof of the exciting action in Navel Gazing, Episode One. I also posted Episode Four of Navel Gazing, “John Dickerson explores the meanings of a giant bed, initials and The Sopranos”. You can browse the full archive at JohnDickerson.com.

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A lovely note form reader Beth Kapocias echoing the themes of Navel Gazing Episode Four:

I’ve been enjoying your Navel Gazing Podcast as much as your Stack the Week offering. I can see that it takes a bit of doing, so I wanted you to know your efforts are appreciated.

Yesterday my daughter and I were returning from a trip to Washington DC. Before the train left the station, she took out her watercolor field box, and asked if we’d brought along any water (she hasn’t yet got the hang of filling the water container). When we realized we neglected to bring a bottle of water, I remembered I’d packed my watercolor field box I’d used in 1993. I said perhaps there’s water in there from the 1900’s. And indeed, there was! Her eyes widened, as she was astounded to be painting with water from another century and another continent away.

A few items from the morning news:

Trump wanted lower rates. His Fed chairman just put a rate increase on the table.

Donald Trump selected Kevin Warsh after repeatedly attacking the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too high—and Trump reportedly sought reassurance that his nominee would lower them. But Warsh promised to protect the Fed’s independence, and his August 28 Jackson Hole speech demonstrated what that can mean in practice.

Warsh said inflation remained too high and suggested that rate increases might be necessary. In a matter of hours, traders raised the estimated probability of a September increase from 35% to nearly 58%, while the two-year Treasury yield jumped from approximately 4.22% to 4.35%.

Bank of America will pay $72.5 million to as many as 75 Epstein accusers.

A federal judge gave final approval to Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with as many as 75 women who accused the bank of facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse. Bank of America denied knowing about Epstein’s trafficking operation and admitted no wrongdoing. The settlement provides a financial consequence without resolving the underlying question of what the bank knew—or should have recognized—while servicing Epstein and his associates.

In 250 years, Americans have elected only three Black governors. Eight are on ballots this year.

Thousands of people have served as American governors, but voters have elected only three Black governors in the country’s history: Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick and Maryland’s Wes Moore. All three are Democratic men. This year, eight Black major-party candidates—including five Democrats and three Republicans, and both men and women—are appearing on gubernatorial ballots. Even if none wins, the field is historically unprecedented. If several win, an office that has remained overwhelmingly white for 250 years could change visibly in a single election.

A Tree Keeps Growing in Brooklyn.

A silver maple stood in the middle of what two Brooklyn developers considered an ideal building site. It was approximately six stories tall, with a trunk five feet across—and removing it would have been the conventional real-estate decision. Instead, the developers spent approximately $400,000 redesigning and constructing their project around the tree. They compared the decision to rescuing a geriatric dog: financially irrational, perhaps, but difficult to resist once the living thing was in their care.

Now some sparkles:

Wildlife Photography.

I find these photographs transporting: The Wildlife photographs of the year.

A Record at the Plate.

“I just wanted to do something spectacular,” 12-year-old Carsynn Meyer told USA Today after hitting a double in her final at-bat of Nevada’s regional championship victory over Montana. The hit helped send her team to the Little League World Series, where Meyer became the first girl under the tournament’s current format to reach the United States championship game. Looking into the stands after the double, she remembered hearing the crowd screaming.

The achievement carried more than half a century of history. In 1972, 12-year-old Maria Pepe pitched three games for a Little League team in Hoboken, New Jersey, before officials forced her off the roster because girls were barred from the program. The resulting court case compelled Little League to admit girls in 1974, although Pepe had already aged out. Meyer first visited Williamsport in June for an all-female tournament named in Pepe’s honor. Two months later, she returned with her Nevada teammates—the boys “CarCar” had played beside for years.

Faster!

Everything feels like it moves so fast these days. Even the Universe is speeding up: A new analysis of Type Ia supernovas disputes recent suggestions that the universe’s expansion has begun to slow. Cosmic expansion still appears to be accelerating, leaving dark energy in its commanding—but entirely mysterious—place in the prevailing account of the universe.

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The idea of this morning recapitulation of my thoughts that occurred to me while I’m doing my morning reading was affirmed by the practice of Deborah Martinson. She was an adjunct professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I was reading her analysis of crime and punishment and learned that after every seminar she would email students a recap of what they had discussed in that seminar that day. This seems to me to be a wonderful thing to do as a teacher. If nothing else, it respects and lifts up the opinions of the students. But it also is a way to lock in the learning in the seminar for the professor.

I wish I had done this at the University of Chicago during my seminars this spring.

JD Vance endorsed Donald Trump in 2023 under the headline “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

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This is another experiment. Not the morning reading. I’ve been doing that for a while. The experiment is to write, though exactly what that means I’m not sure. Perhaps the point is to see what happens when the morning’s information undergoes an immediate translation into words, sentences and paragraphs.

Some of this will feel familiar to Navel Gazing regulars. In part, the goal is slowness, to proceed at the pace of thought. This offers an antidote to the pace of the day and the shredded feeling the day will produce. Even yesterday’s writing about the presidency produced a ragged feeling.

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The birds sang in the wet trees and I listened to them

it was a hundred years from now And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Wet evening in April.

Patrick Kavanagh

-Notebook 1 page 29, 30. Summer 1990

It’s 2026 and I am staring at pro…

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We went to Dollywood a lot with the kids. It’s easy to write off a theme park with a rich woman’s name on the gate as a vanity project. It wasn’t. Not shabby, not cynical. Clean, available to everyone. Close to her roots. (It’s built in the part of Tennessee she grew up poor in and run by the people she grew up among.)

It wasn’t a monument. It was a place families saved up for. The squeak across the seats on the tram from the parking lot. The sit-down after too much funnel cake. The locomotive whistle. Thunderhead.

This isn’t in the top five (ten?) things Dolly accomplished. Still, it affected a lot of people anyway.

Most of what success leaves behind is objects that testify to financial wealth — houses, yachts, jewelry. Dollywood testified to a different wealth. She built somewhere a family could afford to be happy for a day, and made sure it stayed that way for forty years.

The great American national-security blunders have taken different forms: the groupthink behind the Bay of Pigs, Lyndon Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, the failure to connect the dots before 9/11, and the false assumptions, faulty intelligence and wishful planning that produced the Iraq War.

These four are the canon of blundering. In each, the president was one part of an institutional failure — advisers who missed signals, agencies that got the intelligence wrong, a process that broke down around him. Trump’s may be a new kind — not a failure of process, but a failure housed more centrally in the president himself, who actively rejected the process. The intelligence was right. The failure is his alone. That’s worth remembering next time a candidate boasts that he alone can fix something. It’s a warning.

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The warnings were specific. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely produce “a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons.” She warned that Tehran would “rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market,” and attack American forces and partners in the region. Military leaders warned of casualties, depleted weapons stockpiles and readiness problems for an already overstretched force.

All of it happened. The war Trump promised would end within six weeks has reached the six-month mark without a clear end.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” Eric Brewer, a former national-security official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Journal.

I want to make a larger point but first, to show that I have metabolized the scale of the harm of this decision: we are watching the consequences spool out in real time as the administration lunges toward something it can call success. Consider the new economic sanctions announced Monday. Enforcing them against the Chinese institutions that sustain Iran could provoke a confrontation with Beijing. Declining to enforce them could expose another American threat as hollow. Longer term, the U.S. has burned through roughly two-thirds of its Patriot interceptor stockpile and close to half its THAAD inventory in under six months of fighting — inventories that take years, not months, to rebuild. And there are other years-long consequences: bruised alliances, and nations making choices based on a new — and perhaps warped — understanding of American strategic confusion.

So put this on the to-do list: catalog the consequences of this decision and reward those who come up with the most creative and realistic solutions for containing those consequences and addressing the fallout. This is one way to combat the despair people feel when faced with the president’s combination of bluster and incompetence. Look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers used to say. Seek out and lift up the people who can scope the problem, name the challenges and identify realistic ways of limiting the damage and beginning the repair.

This brings us (if you’re still with me; I feel like I should pack a juice box to give us all a little energy at this point) to my little corner of obsession: presidential campaigns.

Everything about Donald Trump’s decision-making is bad enough, but it gets worse when you measure his performance against his boasts about how he would perform as president. Donald Trump ran on the promise that he had a special quality in just these moments. In the South Carolina primary debate in 2016, he offered his opposition to the Iraq War as evidence of his superior judgment. He also stood by his earlier claim that George W. Bush had lied the country into war.

“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said. “We shoulda never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” When the debate moderator (hi Mom!) reminded him that he had said Bush should have been impeached, Trump replied: “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Earlier in the debate, I had asked Trump to imagine his first day in the Situation Room and name the first three questions he would ask his national-security experts. Robert Gates had complained that the candidates were offering solutions “so simplistic and so at odds with the way the world really works.” Trump’s answer: “What we wanna do, when we wanna do it, and how hard do we wanna hit.”

Oof.

In that same debate, Jeb Bush, who was derided as insufficient for the task of being president, nevertheless outlined a vision of the office.

“The next president’s gonna be confronted with an unforeseen challenge,” Bush said in his closing statement, sounding like the son and brother of presidents who understood one of the defining characteristics of the job. “It could be a pandemic, a major natural disaster or an attack on our country.” The question for voters, he said, was “who do you wanna have sittin’ behind the big desk in the Oval Office?”

Next presidential campaign, listen to Jeb.

Wait, every presidential candidate boasts. Trump is hardly new. Yes, they boast, and they shouldn’t, unless they have the goods. Matching promises with performance is, after all, essentially the job description. More important, we shouldn’t let candidates get away with boasts they can’t back up.

One more point (hit the juice box!): Donald Trump’s boasts were special. He dismissed — and won escalating applause for dismissing — the very idea of planning, expertise and knowledge. He argued that every challenge could be made to disappear by the force of his personality.

No.

The Iran case provides an unusually clean test of his claim: The experts identified the risks, the president trusted his instincts, and the risks became reality.

Every presidential national-security decision comes down to one person. The question was never whether a president acts alone against expert advice — sometimes that’s the job. Barack Obama learned this: he ordered the Bin Laden raid over the explicit objection of Robert Gates, who had more national-security experience than anyone else in the room. The question is how a president makes a lonely decision. Obama had a room of mixed opinion and picked the more confident read. Trump had a room in agreement and picked the opposite of what it told him.

Experts, historians and wise people of good faith could help place this decision among other presidential failures — and determine, based on the reporting, just how badly President Trump shanked it. (Those with expertise will know how to sort post-hoc ass covering now that things have not gone according to plan).

This would help us understand the Trump presidency. It would also help us, in advance of another presidential campaign, develop a vocabulary for the most important aspect of the job. Debate answers of the kind Donald Trump gave repeatedly about Iraq were popular, entertaining and politically successful. They also mischaracterized his own position on that war. No public record supports his claim that he opposed the invasion before it began; when Howard Stern asked him in 2002 whether he favored invading, Trump answered, “Yeah, I guess so.” Most dangerously, those answers turned the

presidency into a cartoon of easy choices effortlessly dispatched by a cartoon image of leadership.

Clearing these cartoons from the stage will help us figure out what a president should be like so that we can ask our candidates if they’re up to the task. Embedded in this failure and every failure of the norm-breaking Trump administration is the raw material for forensic accountability. Not a verdict on one man. A standard the next one has to clear before we hand over the codes.

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1. Chips: Can buyers get enough Nvidia processors, and at what price? The processor is the part doing the main mathematical work: turning language, images, video, and code into numbers, then running enormous calculations on those numbers. Nvidia gets our attention because its chips have become the default machinery for training and running the biggest AI models. It also sells whole server systems around those chips. If Nvidia systems get more expensive or harder to get, the cost of building large AI services rises.

2. Memory: Can those processors get enough specialized high-speed memory, or does memory scarcity push the whole server price up? The processor is fast, but it needs constant access to the model’s data. If the processor has to wait for data, the expensive chip is partly idle. That is why AI systems need specialized memory close to the processor. If that memory gets scarce, the whole machine gets more expensive.

   

3. Packaging: Can the processor and memory be assembled close together fast enough to meet demand? “Packaging” sounds like cardboard, but in chips it means the precise physical assembly that connects the processor, memory, wiring, and other components so they can work as one unit. For AI, the processor and memory have to sit extremely close together because data has to move fast. If there are not enough factories that can do this advanced assembly, Nvidia and its customers can have chips and memory in theory but still not enough finished AI systems.

4. Networking: Can thousands of processors be connected so they behave like one giant computer instead of expensive isolated machines? This means racks of servers, miles of cables, specialized switches, optical links, and software that lets thousands of chips share work without waiting on each other. If the connections are too slow or unreliable, the processors sit around waiting, and the company has paid for a giant computer that cannot fully act like one.

5. Power: Can the data-center site get enough electricity to run continuously? An AI data center can need electricity at the scale of a town or small city. No juice, no glorious future.

6. Grid gear: Can utilities get the transformers, switchgear, substations, and cables needed to physically deliver that electricity? AI is a nest of requirements, one of which has its own nest of requirements. Electricity has to pass through heavy equipment that changes voltage, routes power, and protects the system from failures. Some of that equipment now has long wait times. A data center can have a power contract and still be stuck waiting for the machinery that connects it to the grid.

7. Cooling: Can the building remove the heat from dense racks of AI servers without forcing the chips to slow down or fail? AI chips produce a lot of heat because they are doing nonstop calculations. If the heat is not removed, the chips throttle, crash, or wear out faster.

8. Water: If the cooling system uses water, can the project justify that demand to local communities already worried about drought, rates, or growth? Some data centers use water to carry heat away. That can turn an AI project into a local water fight, especially in dry regions or fast-growing communities where residents already worry about wells, reservoirs, farms, and utility bills.

9. Permits: Will local governments, utility regulators, and residents approve the data center, power upgrades, transmission lines, and water use?

10. Money: If servers, power, land, cooling, debt, and construction all get more expensive, does the buildout still produce enough revenue to justify itself? The AI boom depends on companies believing that future AI revenue will pay for today’s giant infrastructure bills. If the physical parts get more expensive at the same time investors start asking harder questions about profits, some projects get delayed, scaled down, or canceled.

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