She asked: “Do we need yet another billionaire in the race?”

He replied: “Who is the other billionaire?”

Oh, how political America giggled. It knows that the thin-skinned Donald hates nothing more than having his manhood questioned. And for Trump his manhood is, to a larger extent than with most men it seems, his money.

So where is his money? Here the events of recent weeks are deeply relevant. The President is, by his own admission, not much of a stocks and shares man. He likes stuff you can see: preferably from a distance. Stuff with space for a neon sign. Casinos, hotels, resorts, golf clubs. Places where people mingle and spend money. Places with staircases the late Saddam Hussein would appreciate. Places that are closed or about to close for extended periods as the Covid-19 wave breaks across the USA and the wider world.

So when the President says – as he did on the day he announced he was standing for office – “I’m very rich,” do we still believe him? There is no completely certain way of judging. This is because the Trump organisation — run now by his sons Don Jr. and Eric — is a private company. It seems fair to say, though, that they are taking a hit.

The President likes to keep his eyes on Fox News, but if his sons, worried about the money, were watching CNBC the other day they will have heard Bill Ackman of Pershing capital suggesting that even Hilton Hotels, one of the world’s strongest hospitality brands, was “going to zero”. If we carry on with this shutdown, he said, “every hotel company in the world is done”.

So does this mean coronavirus is going to wipe out the Trump empire?

Trump properties have been doing well recently, in part – controversially to put it mildly – because the fundraising effort for his 2020 run has seen large meetings requiring expensive rooms in … well, actually in Trump properties. According to the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a two-day event in December at Trump’s Washington DC hotel, hosted by Trump Victory, saw the cheapest rooms going for $6,719 compared with the usual rate of $500. That’s the art of the fundraising deal.

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CREW say there have been 81 political events held in Trump properties since the presidency began, 122 events held by outside special interest groups, 143 visits by foreign officials and 468 by the president himself. The phrase ‘conflict of interest’ hardly does justice to the scale of this branding/money making/room filling exercise.

But the truth is that even before the Covid disaster, Donald Trump’s properties were not doing well. As a couple of investigative journalists at Forbes Magazine put it in 2018: “Donald Trump is not getting richer off the presidency. Just the opposite. His net worth, by our calculation, has dropped from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion the last two years.”

It’s a lot of money. But it sits on a pile of debt estimated by Bloomberg (the organisation, not the man) to be around half a billion dollars. “I am the king of debt,” Mr. Trump once said on CNN. “I love debt.” What if that debt, in the wake of current events, balloons?

It has happened before. In his book, Trumpocracy, David Frum, one of Trump’s fiercest Republican opponents, puts it like this:

“Donald Trump and his Kushner in-laws are perceived as fabulously wealthy. But while they do own substantial assets, they also owe enormous debts…Trump has teetered on the edge of financial ruin again and again throughout his career.”

The extent of the teetering would be gut-wrenching to any ordinary person. In his pre-presidency biography of Trump, The Truth about Trump, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio has a chapter entitled Luck Runs Out. Michael is a mild-mannered man with a twinkly smile: I think he liked the restraint of this description. The reality was grotesque.

‘Donald Trump’s big bet’ was how the Washington Post headlined its piece on the Taj Mahal Atlantic City — the biggest (of course) casino the city had ever seen. On a pre-opening tour the paper was horrified by vulgarity but impressed, in spite of itself, with the ambition: “With more than 3,000 slot machines and 167 blackjack, roulette and other gaming tables, the Taj will boost Atlantic City’s gambling capacity by 20 percent when it opens April 2.”

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“We’re calling it the eighth wonder of the world,” said Donald Trump of his creation. “I think it’s going to do huge numbers. The overall majesty of the building is what’s going to attract people. People are just amazed at the opulence.”

After opening in 1990, it went belly-up in 1991 — along with an airline shuttle Trump ran between New York and Washington.    What happened next is instructive for those who think the President might be done in by the Covid-19 depression.

Six thousand people lost their jobs. The man who made the elephant statue for the garden was one among many contractors who claim they were never paid. But Donald Trump walked away from the wreckage. Because, as the old adage goes, if you owe the bank a tenner it’s your problem, if you owe 10 million it’s theirs. And it was theirs.

As D’Antonio puts it in his account of the fallout from the collapse: “Trump grasped the power of his position after the lender who had held the mortgage on his yacht not only accepted that Trump had stopped making payments but but took responsibility for the vessel’s upkeep and insurance at a cost of $500,000 a month.”

Trump, so it goes, was too big to fail. Well here we go again. According to the Wall St Journal: “More than 500 staff at Trump properties in New York, Washington, Las Vegas and Florida have been laid off or furloughed, say people familiar with the matter and federal disclosures. Several Trump hotels have been closed, and those still running have experienced dwindling occupancies. One day in March, the family’s flagship Trump International Hotel in Washington had just 11 guests in its 263 rooms, according to an employee.”

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Eric Trump told the paper: “We have an unbelievably strong company and we continue to pray for the health and safety of all Americans,” but went into no more details about what happens now. So it does look like Donald Trump could be in serious trouble on paper as a result of the shutdown he is belatedly supporting — and there are surely plenty of Americans who would see that as an upside of the virus.

But history suggests Donald Trump’s businesses and fortune have an uncanny ability to bounce back — while all around go bankrupt. If the rich ‘are different from you and me’ then Donald Trump is different from most of them too. As he put it once to an incredulous lawyer in a court deposition, “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”

Yes, he believes he can control his wealth with his feelings. And, for now at least, the President of the United States almost certainly believes that he is still “very rich”. Who are we to suggest otherwise…

If it looks screwy — I owe how much to HMRC? — it’s often worth searching for a misplaced zero.

But what if the sums and your feeling of what is ‘roughly right’ coincide perfectly because you are not only a dimwit when it comes to calculation but a you have no idea about wider truths either: you cannot do a ballpark calculation sensibly because you don’t know what a ballpark looks like?

This horrifying coincidence of mathematical and spatial myopias did great damage last week to the reputation of one of America’s best-know broadcasters and to MSNBC, the Left-wing Fox News equivalent that plays an important role in geeing up Democrats for the presidential fight.

I will get to why it matters so much in a moment but first the fun of the broadcast. It was a live interview between square-jawed Brian Williams (in 2007, one of Time magazine’s Top 100 most influential people in the world, though a bit of a lion in winter these days) and a woman called Mara Gay, who is a member of the New York Times editorial board, a former Wall St Journal reporter and a graduate of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, one of the top academic institutions in the United States.

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They were doing what people do on cable news: discussing a tweet.

The tweet had said that Michael Bloomberg had spent $500 million on his presidential campaign. That bit was true. Then, noting that there are 327 million Americans — also true — the tweeter suggested that Bloomberg could have given each American a million dollars “and still had lunch money left over”.

Brian Williams went full Ron Burgundy.

“When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear,” he said.

“It’s an incredible way of putting it,”

“It’s an incredible way of putting it,” agreed Ms Gay. She added: “It’s true. It’s disturbing.”

Cue massive hilarity and embarrassment and piling-on. Numerate America pointed out that 500 million divided by 327 million is roughly 1.5. Not a million. Just one dollar and fifty cents could have been the gift Bloomberg made to everyone in the nation.

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Now, wait a moment. Highly educated people are often innumerate — UnHerd’s Tom Chivers frequently, if gently, points this out. It’s awful but it’s true. Effortlessly numerate commentators stand out because there are so few of them. One of the reasons why Evan Davis is such a wonderful asset to the BBC is that he can count: he can see numbers.

So let’s give Brian Williams and Mara Gay a pass on the maths. Let’s assume we are all of us (except Tom) in the same glasshouse here and we are eyeing the stones but deciding not to throw. No: let us concentrate instead on the context, the ballpark.

This is the real horror story. These two people, whose entire jobs can be described as knowing things about society, seriously believed (“It all became clear.” “True.” “Disturbing.”) that it might be possible for Michael Bloomberg to give every American a million dollars without it making any impact on his wealth. Every American. Folk in small-town diners. College kids. Donald Trump. My own daughter Clara (as a citizen, I assume she’d qualify — yippee!)

How could that feel right? How could it feel true? Why would he not have done it already and asked if they might consider voting for him when they cashed the cheque?

The answer is that for a certain group of Americans who want to see change but not pay for it, the idea has taken hold that all that needs to happen for everyone in the nation to be wealthy is for a few billionaires to give away part of their wealth: note ‘part of,’ not even much of it.

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The idea has skewed the debate about healthcare that seems likely to be the ground zero of the presidential campaign in the autumn.

Plenty of Sanders supporters seem to genuinely believe that American healthcare could become free at the point of delivery — entirely government funded — if a few wealthy people paid more tax. Perhaps they think Mike Bloomberg could fund it.

It’s barmy. And to be fair to Senator Sanders, he makes no such claims. Yes, he points out that according to the think tank the Institute for Policy Studies three people — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos — own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population.

True. Disturbing, even.

But Sanders does not pretend that going after them and them alone is not enough to change America.

As well as “getting rid of billionaires” (he has a car bumper sticker promising this so it must be true) he acknowledges the need for the much less wealthy to chip in: employees would pay a 4% premium on all income above $29,000 to fund Medicare for All, he says. So once you earn serious money you would be paying a decent whack.

And here’s the rub. Williams seems to think — along with so many on the American Left — that it is not about him. The billionaires will foot the bill for fairness. But it’s nonsense. The brilliant English think-tanker Richard Reeves pointed out years ago — in his book Dream Hoarders — that the top 20% of the USA should be where the finger is pointed and the redistribution might begin. These, Reeves says, are the comfortably off who have used their wealth and their cultural power to cream off the best of American life for themselves.

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“It would be an exaggeration to say that the upper-middle-class is full of gluten-avoiding, normal-BMI joggers who are only marginally more likely to smoke a cigarette than to hit their children,” Reeves wrote. “But it would be just that — an exaggeration, not a fiction.”

This is where the debate about American inequality should perhaps be focused: where it could make a real difference. It’s not (just) about the billionaires; it’s about the glass floor that separates the upper-middle-class of America from the rest.

It’s about persuading the gluten-free joggers to have respect for people who live in communities in which gender roles are still marked. In which family ties still matter more than any other. In which you run in the street only to get away from a mugger or the police.

Many of these folks rather like billionaires. They admire their energy. They envy them their yachts. Suggesting to them that life could be dandy if the billionaires coughed up is insulting to their intelligence, and avoids, according to those who study these matters seriously, the real problem.

In sleek studios in New York, it is easier to discuss tweets about billionaires and mangle maths than to focus on what would drive real change. That would require a talk about class. Where do millions of people like Brian Williams spend their holidays? Where do their kids go to university? And are they willing to give up their privilege? As a fellow broadcaster I suspect he’d employ one of our favourite get-out clauses — always true on the Today programme of course — “I’m so sorry, we’re out of time…”

In church on Sunday, too, I could feel the anxiety radiate out from my coughing away behind the altar into a twitchy congregation. We have suspended sharing the peace for the time being. Instead of shaking hands or kissing, we wave at each other. So, too, we have decided to take communion in one kind only — that is, we share the bread but not the common cup of wine. And in this context, the symbolic handwashing the priest performs before the Eucharist is no longer simply a ritual act. It feels like a necessity. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

But this cross-over between cleanliness and moral and religious purpose is one that makes a lot of people even more nervous than the virus itself. The moralisation of disgust is regarded as a dangerous Right-wing/religious cross-over that has regularly been aimed against “unclean” menstruating women and against lesbian and gay people especially. Moralised disgust is a familiar expression of hostility to gay sex, for example. And as Ed West made clear in his excellent piece on the black death, it has historically been employed to stoke the flames of anti-Semitism. Jews were said to spread the plague. The politics of cleanliness is often a way we are encouraged to fear the threatening presence of the other.

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And no one is more adept at employing the language of disgust against his opponents than Donald Trump. As Hillary Clinton went for a bathroom break during the Democratic debate in 2015, Trump commented: “I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting, let’s not talk.” And he was back at moralised disgust again this week, calling out Michael Bloomberg for the way he was eating a pizza: “Mini Mike, don’t lick your dirty fingers. Both unsanitary and dangerous to others and yourself!” he tweeted.

Which is why this dreaded virus is playing right into Trump’s hands at a pivotal electoral moment. For Covid-19 is amplifying the politics of the bathroom and its connection to a fear of the other. “The virus is a weapon” my barber explained to me this week, surveying his empty shop, “invented by the Chinese.” I mumbled disagreement through the hot towel wrapped around my face.

But those who want to resist these dangerous conclusions, need to do more than mumble their opposition to it. They need to understand where it comes from.

Back in 2012, the political philosopher Jonathan Haidt published the hugely influential The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion, a book that sought to explain the appeal of the conservative world view to liberals —who generally find it totally incomprehensible. At the heart of Haidt’s explanation is the point that conservatives employ a more extensive palate of political values, including values such as purity and disgust. These, Haidt contends, are values that the right employs — to powerful electoral effect — but liberals denigrate and misunderstand.

As Richard Dawkins tweeted last year:

Tissue culture “clean meat” already in 2018? I’ve long been looking forward to this.https://t.co/p41NR3NEZn
What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism? An interesting test case for consequentialist morality versus “yuck reaction” absolutism.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 3, 2018

Which is why my UnHerd colleague Peter Franklin describes himself on his Twitter bio as a “yuck reaction absolutist”.

Consider another example. Is there anything morally wrong with having sex with a dead chicken in the privacy of one’s own kitchen (or bedroom?) — not one specifically killed for the purpose, for that introduces an element of harm — but one purchased at the supermarket? Strictly from the perspective of the liberal world view, where harm is understood as the deciding moral factor, there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with having sex with a dead chicken. After all, what or who is harmed in the act? Yet the sense that there is indeed something wrong here would be a common reaction. Would Dawkins see this, too, as yuck absolutism?

In my view, the best person to read in order to understand the workings of disgust and purity as a moral reaction is the anthropologist Mary Douglas. For Douglas, the nature of impurity only makes sense in terms of a world view in which things have a certain place. An ‘impure’ substance is not, in and of itself, impure — it is simply in the wrong place. And, so, saliva is not disgusting your own mouth. But is disgusting if you are invited to spit it in a glass and then re-swallow it. Dirt is a good thing in the garden, but a bad thing when trampled through the house. In other words, impurity and disgust are context dependent. And here is the big point: disgust and purity only make sense with reference to a sort of map of the world in which things have a certain place.

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The phrase “a place for everything and everything in its place” – often associated with Benjamin Franklin – has its origin in a religious world-view: “The Lord hath set everything in its place and order”, preached Bishop John Hacket in 1675. The sentiment behind “a place for everything and everything in its place” is probably a popular Victorian rendition of this religious idea. God sets things in a certain order during creation. And disgust is a gut reaction to things not being as God has set them up to be, or — in a secular rendition of the same basic idea — as nature intended.

Small wonder Dawkins is not a fan. The Bible proposes a map of the world where all things have their place. Ritual washing is a form of boundary maintenance. And the nightmare from this perspective is when boundaries are effaced and things come together that shouldn’t come together.

As the barber was jabbering on about the Chinese, the plot of Mission: Impossible II started running through my head. The baddies make a weapon out of a virus. Ethan Hunt has to save the world. The virus is called Chimera. Significantly, the chimera is a figure of Greek mythology, an animal that is composed of different parts of different animals: the body of a lion, the head of a goat, and a tail that becomes a snake. The chimera represents perfectly the fear of things coming together that shouldn’t come together.

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But unlike Peter Franklin, I wouldn’t describe myself as a “Yuck reaction absolutist”. In fact, I don’t think he is one either. Because there are yuck reaction absolutists who would, for instance, regard the marriage of a non-Jew to a Jew — my marriage — as a contravention of the need for strict boundary maintenance. The hostility to so-called miscegenation is a variant of the fear of the chimera. And we are right to be having none of it.

There is, though, an ocean of space to negotiate between Dawkins’s refusal to recognise anything to the wisdom of repugnance, and Trump’s desire to weaponise it against minorities. And this is territory that the Left is so much more uncomfortable exploring than the Right. For boundary maintenance is not just a visceral refusal to eat human tissue or have sex with frozen chickens. It is also about protecting the vulnerable from unrestricted capital flows and the community-dissolving properties of globalisation. This should be territory the Left gets involved in: boundaries are not just ways of othering people, they are also mechanisms of legitimate protection from harm.

What liberals generally don’t get is that the desire for a world in which everything has a proper place is a reaction to a radically uncertain world, a world in which boundaries have been effaced, and thus a world in which nothing is protected, nothing is safe – especially for the most vulnerable. Our fear of the virus is partly that it knows no boundaries. That it is the great disease of globalisation. And unless the Left finds a way to distinguish good boundary maintenance from bad boundary maintenance, it will keep on handing electoral victories to the likes of Donald Trump.

Nearly 75,000 people have already voted for a Democratic candidate in Nevada — an extraordinarily high number: the overall turn out four years ago was 84,000. There are 36 delegates in play. Heading into the Paris Theatre for the final match-up before tomorrow’s caucuses, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders looked the favourite to take the state.

The debate did little to change that. Instead, the Democratic frontrunners honed their fire on Bloomberg, with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts particularly fierce in her attacks on the former New York Mayor. Warren talked of a “billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians”:

“No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”

The Sanders campaign received a big boost ahead of the caucus debate when it won the backing of Mijente, a grass-roots Latino group. The group has a 300,000-person email list of supporters whom it will now mobilise to canvas for the Vermont senator. Sanders has already raised four times as much money from Latino contributors as any other Democratic candidate.

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A victory for Sanders in Nevada would stand him in good stead for the Democratic nomination, after victories in the popular vote in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign of his biggest challenger, Joe Biden, is visibly flailing. Indeed, a voter asked Biden bluntly during an event in Nevada “What the hell is going on with your campaign?”

Eric Lee, a joint coordinator of the Sanders 2020 campaign in the UK, told me that Sanders will win the Nevada caucuses “because he understands better than any other Democrat the two things that have changed in American politics in this century”.

“The first is that the economic crisis of 2008 dealt a death blow to the ‘American dream’, with rising inequality, poverty wages and a trade union movement in terminal decline. The second is that with the collapse of Communism, democratic socialism — which was never a dirty word here in Europe — is no longer a dirty word in America either, especially among young people.”

For some, it may be comforting to put the rise of Bernie Sanders (and Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter) down to youthful irresponsibility and even historical amnesia when it comes to socialism. But there is a real material base for disillusionment with contemporary capitalism.

As Sanders pointed out during a speech at George Washington University in the summer, “the average wage of the American worker in real dollars is no higher than it was forty-six years ago”. He also noted that “life expectancy is declining for the first time in modern American history”.

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Nevada — and specifically Las Vegas — is often associated with the vulgar trappings of the free market. Vegas is home to giant casinos, bottle service clubs, prostitution, pawnshops and ostentatious wealth. Yet trade unionism remains strong — built into the sprawling casinos, hotels and restaurants. Nearly a quarter of North America’s powerful UNITE HERE union members are based in Nevada, forming a branch known as the Culinary Workers Union; the northwestern city of Reno, like Vegas, is a union stronghold.

The Las Vegas skyline is dominated by the giant, gold-coloured hotels belonging to the Wynn group — of Steve Wynn, the long-time Vegas hotelier who opened the first big hotel on the Strip, the Mirage, back in 1989. It was Wynn who struck the first big neutrality agreement with The Culinary (as the Culinary Workers Union is known), ensuring that the union would not be persecuted by management during attempts to sign up members. Other hoteliers soon fell into line.

Today, virtually every hotel on the Las Vegas strip is organised. This bodes well for the Sanders campaign, with much of the Vermont Senator’s rhetoric focusing on issues of class and economic justice.

Yet The Culinary — which is the most powerful union in the state — dislikes Sanders’ Medicare for all bill, which it fears will eliminate the private insurance it won for members. As it did in 2016, the Culinary has declined to endorse any of the candidates (in 2008, it backed Obama). After the announcement on Friday, two leading Culinary officials received threats by phone and online from Sanders’ supporters.

Michael González, a 45-year-old housekeeper who works for MGM resorts and has already voted, told me over the phone that he hadn’t voted for Sanders because of specific concerns he has over the Senator’s healthcare plans. “The plan I [currently] have through the union works for me,” González said.

“I see why the people with no healthcare at all are liking Bernie and what he’s saying, but when you’ve already got a good … plan you’re not gonna necessarily take a gamble on this Medicare for all. My plan could get worse [under Sanders’ vision] and it’s hard for me to vote for something like that.”

The row highlights a friction between ‘fortress unionism’ and the universalist, social democratic message of the Sanders campaign. But he nevertheless remains on course: a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released on Tuesday gave Sanders a double-digit lead over the rest of his competitors in the Nevada primary.

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Still, it was Warren who undoubtedly ‘won’ Wednesday’s debate. It is probably too late for her to take the primary, however (though she did reportedly raise $425,000 in just 30 minutes). Meanwhile, Sanders didn’t slip up: he did a good job of deflecting attacks on him, and so finished the debate as he started it — as the frontrunner.

And so the Nevada caucus probably won’t be the game-changer hoped for by the underdogs. We’ll find out for sure when the post-debate polls start coming in. An improved showing for Warren seems likely, with Bloomberg faltering as the attacks on the billionaire business tycoon gain traction (many younger Democrats will not have known that Bloomberg supported George W. Bush in 2004 until Sanders raised the point in Wednesday’s debate). In the background, Biden continued to flail, and Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old politician from Indiana, failed to set the stage alight as some hoped he would.

Following the vote-counting debacle in Iowa earlier this month, the Nevada Democratic Party will mainly be hoping that the vote-counting process runs smoothly after tomorrow’s caucus. As things stand, the nomination looks increasingly like Sanders’ to lose.

Take the current row about self-confessed “data nerd” (see Twitter profile) and Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg and his recently unearthed comments about farming. Bloomberg is a poster boy of the digital age. A Harvard Business school alumnus, he made his billions — more than 60 of them — from selling computer software to the financial services industry. That made him the 12th richest person in the world. But for all this lucrative data savvy — or perhaps because of it — Bloomberg has shown himself to be excessively clumsy in his reflections on the degree of difficulty required to grow crops. Speaking to a group of Oxford University students in 2016, soon after Trump became President, Bloomberg reflected on a contrast between the intellectual demand of farming and that of the information age:

“If you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we can teach processes. I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offence intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”

“Now comes the information economy, and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyse. And that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set. You have to have a lot more gray matter.”

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By Giles Fraser

Supporters of Bloomberg have insisted that these remarks have been taken out of context. His opponents, from Trump to Sanders, have used them as evidence that Bloomberg is out of touch with middle America, and with the all-important rural constituency in particular. And there is little doubt these comments have damaged him. But what is going on here is more foundational than mere optics. For what data nerd Michael Bloomberg is revealing in these comments is the tendency of the nerd mentality to reduce certain forms of practice, and the practical intelligence required by them, to pieces of information. It is the subjection of techne by episteme.

To use the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 representation of the issue, the distinction here is one between different forms of knowledge; as he put it, the difference between “knowing-that” (roughly speaking, episteme) and “knowing-how” (techne). Here is an illustration of the difference. Imagine I ask you if you know how to swim, and you say “yes, of course”. But when you get into the water, you sink to the bottom and need rescuing. “I thought you said you knew how to swim,” I challenge. “Oh, I do,” comes the reply. “I have read many books on the physics of buoyancy and about the mechanisms of human propulsion through water. I know all there is to know about how to swim.”

In other words, knowing-how is not necessarily reduceable to knowing-that. You can know all the science there is of swimming or bicycling or farming, but be absolutely rubbish at doing it. Conversely you can be Mark Spitz in the water and not know the first thing about the physics of buoyancy. In other words, farming may (and does) contain a wisdom that cannot be boiled down to “you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn”.

Among those things that Plato identifies as a techne — including weaving, music, cookery, riding a chariot, farming — is that of politics. Politics is a craft as much as it is a science. And those, like Bloomberg, who have been schooled in the information age may have a handle on all of the graphs and data points that are available, but without a sense that politics is an art, and without the knowing-how talent at practising it, the nerdish would-be politician is bound to fail. Take heed, Dominic Cummings.

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And they will fail, not least because confusion between knowing-how and knowing-that is extremely funny. And being laughed at is political kryptonite. Why funny? Let me offer another example — and bear with me here.

The American author John Updike is — like both Bloomberg and Trump — golf obsessed. So am I. And like me, Updike must have spent hours poring over detailed instructional literature explaining how best to hold the club, and the detailed mechanics of how the human body might deliver the club face to the ball at exactly the right angle and speed. Irritatingly, I have friends with what we call “natural ability” who don’t have to go through all this nonsense. They just stand up and hit the ball. Mere mortals like me have to break the process down and carefully reconstruct it. And inevitably, something of the ‘natural ability’ bit gets lost in the process.

In 1959, Updike wrote a very weird short story about how to drink a cup of tea in the style of a golf instruction manual. “In seizure, first touch, with feathery lightness, the rim of the saucer with the pad of the index finger of the right hand… A split second — perhaps .07 — later, the first knuckle of the middle, ‘big’ finger, sliding toward of the centre of the saucer’s invisible underside, and the tip of the thumb must coordinate in a prehensile ‘pinching’ motion.” It goes on like this, on and on, for pages. The comedy here is the comedy of trying to reduce knowing-how to various assertions of knowing-that. And, of course, it’s totally ridiculous to try. Laughable.

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This is the comedy that brings down the nerds from their political thrones. From Cummings’ science-obsessed reduction of politics to information and statistics, to Bloomberg’s inability to recognise the inherent wisdom in a form of practice such as farming, the nerdish desire to collapse knowing-how to knowing-that will tend to be exposed at moments of philosophical comedy where they reveal themselves to be ridiculous.

And this drives the nerds mad. For despite the fact that the information age has granted data nerds great fortunes and cultural power, when faced with the ballot box, it is knowing how, not knowing that that tends to triumph. From Clinton (Bill, not Hillary), to Trump and Johnson, the information age has given us very un-data-y politicians, those whose political intelligence is located in the gut and not on the spreadsheet. Sure, as Plato himself recognised, techne and episteme have a more complex and mutually supporting role than I have described for the purposes of illustration.

These days, top golfers require both. But in the political realm at least, the Cummings-style knowing-that always finds itself playing a supporting role to the Johnson-style knowing-how. In all those worlds where wisdom can be digitised — finance, computers — the nerds will win. But my prediction is that faced with the rat-like political cunning of Donald Trump — someone who knows how to exploit Bloomberg’s knowing-that ridiculousness — Bloomberg will lose. Just as he would on the golf course.

As it happens, Bloomberg and Trump are golf buddies. And, notwithstanding all the claims that he is a terrible cheater, Trump is nevertheless the better player. And Trump rubs it in. “Mini Mike is a short ball (very) hitter. Tiny club head speed”, he tweeted about Bloomberg’s golf game last week. This is the sort of nastiness that nerds have long been subjected to by the playground bully. Bloomberg may be far richer than Trump, but in the wide open space of a democratic contest, Trump knows how troll Bloomberg. And it will probably work. Because at the ballot box, just as out on the links, knowing-how usually beats knowing-that.