A few weeks ago I watched the fascinating and horrifying Netflix documentary Titan: The OceanGate Disaster. It deconstructed the history of the Titan, a tiny submersible vehicle designed and built by the entrepreneur-inventor Stockton Rush, for the purpose of taking wealthy tourists more than two miles from the surface of the North Atlantic down to the seabed to view the wreck of the Titanic, at $250,000 a pop. It had an experimental carbon-fiber hull, and was navigated with the use of a modified video-game controller.

It all worked for several trips until, on June 18, 2023, it didn’t. It imploded partway through its descent, killing its occupants, including Mr. Rush.

The craft was not “ill-fated” in the sense of being unlucky. The event is more accurately described as a tragedy, in the classical sense. The ocean, the craft, and Mr. Rush’s colleagues and crew had all been telling him that something was wrong and that disaster was just a matter of time. But Rush was determined not to listen.

Boeing Corporation, initially a partner in the project, prudently backed away out of safety concerns. More than one expert questioned his use of carbon-fiber as the hull material instead of the standard titanium, as well as its oblong shape instead of the more durable sphere. Rush ignored the acoustic evidence his own staff carefully documented: the pops and cracks which indicated a microscopic fraying of the carbon-fiber material, which got louder as the capsule went deeper and was subjected to more pressure. To passengers in his craft, he dismissed the scary-sounding pops as a normal “seasoning” process. He conducted a lab experiment in which a model was subjected to a pressure equivalent the ocean at the depth of the Titanic. The model collapsed. Steps were taken to improve the material…but it was not retested to see if those improvements worked. Most importantly, whenever members of his own staff raised issues, he responded by firing them or bullying them into quitting.

Rush had several motives for ignoring the truth. A submersible built of carbon fiber is much cheaper to build and transport than one made of titanium. Starting over with a new design would have meant having to confront unhappy investors, and postponing those $250k-a-seat excursions for years. And it would have been a blow to the man’s pride. He was the maverick, the genius who had no time for the establishment’s experts. He knew better than they.

The Titan story crossed my mind this week when I read about Donald Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He fired her because the Bureau had reported an unexpectedly weak job market for this past June. He claimed that those statistics were “rigged,” without providing any evidence. Of course, the bad news was necessarily rigged, since Trump is president, Trump is a genius businessman, and therefore any bad economic news must be false news.

Now, I’m not an economist and I don’t know what’s going to happen to our economy. So far it’s been a sturdy little craft, holding up surprisingly well to the rough seas of absurdly steep tariffs applied (then lifted, then re-applied) to capriciously selected nations and products, and the gutting of longstanding federal institutions charged with keeping an eye out for financial malfeasance.

But the firing or bullying of bona-fide experts like Ms. McEntarfer and Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, makes me very nervous. They are economists, and appear to know what they’re doing. I don’t trust Donald Trump, a businessman who has grown rich by making real-estate deals, raking in the profits where there were any, and expertly playing U.S. bankruptcy law to leave someone else holding the bag when there weren’t, to understand reality and act in a way that won’t lead to a global economic implosion.  

Of course the comparison between Stockton Rush and Donald Trump is imperfect. Rush believed in his version of reality enough to put his own life on the line, and he paid the price for it. I can’t figure out whether Trump actually believes what he says and tweets, or whether he cares, or whether he even bothers to make a mental distinction between fact and his own fiction. This is, after all, the man who praised the use of “truthful hyperbole” as a sales tactic in The Art of the Deal, and whose one-time press secretary Kellyanne Conway memorably coined the phrase “alternative facts” when confronted with, well, lies about the attendance figures at Trump’s first inauguration.

Another difference is that, unlike Rush, Trump won’t have to suffer the consequences of his recklessness. No matter what happens, he’s never going to have to worry about where his next meal is coming from. But as jobs disappear and prices of imported products and materials rise, millions of Americans and billions of people around the world might.

Photo of Stockton Rush provided by OceanGate via Wikimedia, license available at OceanGate, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, photo available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stockton_Rush_(cropped).png

Photo of Donald Trump provided by Fulton County Sheriff’s Office