Dear Reader,

In the world of medicine, it is typically the doctor who both makes the diagnosis and prescribes the treatment. There are exceptions of course, as when your general practitioner says you’ve broken a bone and sends you to an orthopedist to handle the treatment. But generally speaking, the competence in diagnosis and in treatment resides in the same person. Your eye hurts, you go to the ophthalmologist, she concludes you have a scratched cornea, she treats you with some eye drops, and warns you away from contact lenses for a week. Same drill usually for a cardiologist, a urologist, or an oncologist. And this all makes good sense.

I’ve been thinking lately that this expectation, which is sensible in medicine, is quite foolish and even dangerous in politics. The rhetorically adept politician who can well articulate what ails the body politic is often woefully inadequate to the task of healing it. And yet voters are often taken in by the resonance of the diagnosis and sweep such people into office.

Donald Trump is the latest and most awful example. Whatever else you may think of him, he presented, in 2016, a powerful and resonant diagnosis of what was sick and wrong about American politics and government. I acknowledged as much in the first speech I gave after being fired more than three years ago, at Cooper Union: “[Y]ou know what? There is a swamp. A lot of the system is rigged. And lots of your fellow Americans have been forgotten and left behind. Those are not alternative facts. That is not fake news.”