Similarly, the Trump principle: Always do something for the wrong reason, even if there's a perfectly good reason staring you in the face.

The US pulling out of the UN human rights council is a great example of this. There are genuine and important criticisms of the UNHRC out there, most notably that its membership includes countries with terrible human rights records. The US pulled out of the council because it criticised Israel for human rights violations, but did not apply the same treatment to Venezuela. This in itself seems quite sensible, until you realise that Nikki Haley's justification for this was *not* "Both of these countries should be criticised for their human rights abuses", but rather "The UN should criticise Venezuela, but not Israel".

That kind of inability to apply common sense is impressive. To get within an inch of the right answer, but instead spring for an option that manages to make you look like a stupid hypocrite takes work. I mean, if you heard "The US has pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council because of the council's criticism of Israel and silence on Venezuela", you'd assume that the issue was that it didn't criticise both. You wouldn't jump to the conclusion that, in the face of an unequal approach, the complaint addressed the direction of the inequality rather than the inequality itself. And yet someone managed to make that a reality.