This Is Not a Training Environment

One of our core values as Americans is the belief that anyone is capable of leadership. We don’t subscribe to the notion that where you are born dictates where you end up. We believe that if you work hard, you can rise. That’s the American Dream.

But over time, we dropped the hard work part. Now folks seem to think that leadership can be learned in real time.

The modern campaign doesn’t look anything like what our founding fathers went through. In fact, they didn’t aggressively campaign at all. They envisioned a system where communities would recognize and nominate their leaders. They were suspicious of anyone who actively sought out power.

But 250 years later, we have a political apparatus that duct tapes together two completely different ecosystems: campaigns reward message discipline and performance while governing demands judgment under pressure and fluency in complex systems. Even though the two worlds overlap, the skillsets do not.

What Crisis Reveals

The gap becomes impossible to ignore in moments of crisis. When systems are under strain and time disappears, there is no learning curve that can unfold gradually. The job is already in motion.

Crisis has a way of exposing what’s underneath. It strips away the messaging, the framing, and the carefully constructed narratives. When the problem in front of you can’t be spun, the only thing that matters is whether you can make decisions and execute them.

The pandemic made that distinction impossible to ignore. The Department of Health and Human Services was not an abstract policy shop when COVID surged. It was the center of a national effort to move vaccines, distribute equipment, and stabilize a system under enormous stress. Decisions were tied directly to outcomes measured in lives, not headlines.

The skills required to lead in that moment don’t magically show up when you need them. If they’re not already there, people pay for it. As former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said on this week’s episode of At Our Table, we cannot afford to have leaders who need on-the-job training.

The directive inside HHS was simple on paper: save lives. The reality was tragically much more complicated. Thousands of Americans were dying each day. Supply chains were strained. Public confidence was fragile. Coordination had to stretch across agencies and into the private sector. There was no version of that moment where improvisation alone would carry you through.

When Competence Gets Replaced

The risk doesn’t stop with inexperience. It gets worse when politics starts to replace competence.

There has been a steady drift toward treating expertise as optional, as if technical knowledge can be swapped out for instinct or narrative. In some arenas, that might only lead to confusion. In healthcare, it leads to harm.

“That’s not science, that’s politics,” Becerra said during our conversation. It’s a simple line, but it captures something bigger. When decision-making isn’t backed by expertise, systems break down.

You don’t have to look far to see how this plays out. The current administration has made the case more clearly than any op-ed could. It turns out that if you remove the expectation of preparation, talent, and intelligence, truly anyone can rise to the top. Mediocrity is not new in politics. Neither is incompetence. But it’s concerning how quickly we became comfortable with both at the highest levels of power.

Campaigning vs. Governing

Part of the problem is that we treat campaigning and governing as if they require the same skillset. They don’t.

Campaigns deal in possibilities. Governing deals in constraints. Campaigns can adjust. Governing has to deliver.

On the campaign trail, broad ideas are an asset. You can refine them later. In office, the questions get specific very quickly. What gets funded? What gets cut? What happens first? What happens if it doesn’t work?

Those decisions sit inside systems that are big, complicated, and often unforgiving. Running a federal department means managing budgets as large as entire states, leading teams across the country, and making decisions that affect people’s daily lives. At the state level, housing, infrastructure, education, and health care all collide in ways that don’t have clean answers.

Setting direction and relying on your political instincts will only take you so far. You need to know how to keep everything moving.

What Experience Actually Means

The kind of experience that matters in those environments rarely translates into a compelling campaign moment. It doesn’t produce viral clips. It doesn’t come with sweeping promises.

It shows up in decisions that prevent problems from getting worse and in systems that keep working when they’re under pressure. You’re actively rooting for outcomes that look uneventful because the worst-case scenario never happened.

That’s hard to measure. It’s even harder to campaign on. So voters are left evaluating candidates based on traits that are easier to see but less relevant to the job.

This helps explain why the loudest voices tend to rise. Volume can look like confidence, and confidence can look like readiness. But the environments that reward those traits are not the ones that test them.

A campaign can absorb mistakes and recalibrate. A governing institution in the middle of a crisis cannot. The feedback loop is immediate, and the consequences add up quickly.

The challenge going forward is not simply to identify experienced candidates. It is to understand what that experience represents. Years in office do not guarantee competence, but exposure to complex decision-making environments increases the likelihood that a leader has developed the necessary instincts. It builds familiarity with tradeoffs and an appreciation for the limits of any single solution. It creates a baseline for making quick decisions.

This doesn’t mean new voices shouldn’t lead. That’s the point of elections. The real question is where and when that leadership happens.

Some roles give you room to learn as you go. Others don’t. We’ve stopped treating those roles differently.

The Choice Ahead

As the next election gets closer, the conversation will shift back to policy, ideology, and campaign strategy. That all matters. But there’s a more basic question underneath it: who can actually do the job?

Who has managed something complicated? Who has worked under real pressure when the outcome wasn’t guaranteed? Who can make decisions and then follow through?

There’s no clean metric for that. You have to look past the campaign and pay attention to what someone has actually done. Not what they say they’ll do, but how they’ve handled real responsibility.

At a certain point, the difference between looking prepared and actually being prepared stops being a matter of opinion. It shows up in outcomes.

And that brings us back to the American Dream.

And right now, we’re getting a very clear example of what happens when preparation is treated as optional.

Donald Trump didn’t rise through the kind of effort the American Dream is supposed to reward. He inherited wealth, bullied his way to access, and built a life around performance. The people around him didn’t get there by proving they could run anything. They got there by proving they would say yes. Power, in that orbit, is handed out based on loyalty, not competence.

The American Dream was never about skipping the work. It was about the idea that hard work and preparation would open doors that were once closed. That merit would matter. That responsibility would be earned before it was handed over.

It’s time to ask ourselves which dream is worth pursuing.