I've consistently advocated the theory that Donald Trump has a rapidly progressing case of dementia, and I'll stand by it, even though I have no qualifications to maintain that at all.
But what if he isn't demented. How do you explain his behavior?
We'll take a look.
He's just stupid
This is a real possibility.
There's no real reason to believe that Trump is intelligent. His success in business, which is often cited is pretty much based on his having inherited a vast amount of wealth. As studies have shown, people who inherit a lot of money are likely remain wealthy no matter what. It actually takes real effort for them to fall down into a lower economic class.
There's plenty of evidence that Trump is simply dumb. He appears to say whatever floats through his head he adopts the views of people around him without thought, he asks questions of his aid that are really, well, dumb.
And really stupid people often tend to be either profoundly kind, or profoundly mean. Trump seems to fit in to the latter category. The nuances of morality that most people have require some degree of intelligence. Trump simply lacks that, perhaps, so being really mean just comes naturally to him.
How then did he get to be President?
Well one thing is that people tend to assume that wealth equals smarts. He has a lot of money, so he must be smart, right?
Nope.
But as people tend to believe that, they tend also to fill in the blanks for the stupid person so that their support of him is rationalized.
In the past, we saw that a lot with sports. Some sports figure may be as dumb as a box of rock, but as people want to idolize him, they make excuses for everything the person says or does.
And the entire celebrity worship thing in American culture is part of that. People take seriously things celebrities say, as they must be smart, or they wouldn't be celebrities, right?
To add to it, the dumb int he public eye tend, normally to be protected by handlers, which Trump was up until very recently. Now that he's not the stupidity of much of what he says and does is really coming to the forefront.
Finally, intelligence is complicated. There are polymaths who are sort of universally intelligent, but there are also people who can excel at one thing without really being smart at anything else. Trump clearly has skills as a salesman. That frankly seems to be the only talent he has.
On that, I've known a few salesmen really well and often been surprised by how little interest they have in the topic of what they sell, or anything else. An extremely successful real estate broker I know, for example surprised me when he revealed he had once been a car salesman. They are, however, both sales.
A car salesman that I knew once surprised me in a conversation by revealing he really knew nothing about automobiles at all, and wasn't interested in them. Cars bored him pretty clearly, but he was really good at selling them. Selling is what interested him.
Trump may very well be like that. He has good sales skills, which doesn't mean he's really very interested in anything he's selling.
A problem with the stupid is that they won't acknowledge it. I don't think its true that most stupid people don't have an inkling they're dumb, but how they react to it is different. Some simply accept it. Others reject it. Some seek constant affirmation that they aren't dumb. Trump seems to fit into that category.
Aiding that, we'd note, is that he's been surrounded by people who have been telling him that he's really smart his entire life. Everyone has witnessed something like that personally, where somebody is protected from reality until they simply don't know what it is.
There's sort of a Chauncey Gardiner element to this, we'd note. In the film Being There, a simple minded man is mistake for a genius and becomes an advisor to the President simply because of his appearance and apparent station in life. It's very difficult for most people to accept that somebody who has achieved apparent success isn't extremely smart. I recall my mother, for instance, being of the view that Barrack Obama must be a genius (I'm not saying that he wasn't) because he was a lawyer. It doesn't take smarts to become a lawyer, and one of the most successful ones I ever met with not a smart man at all. He was just lucky.
Added to this, people, once they latch on to a figure, tend to attribute their own values to him. We've seen this in spades with Trump. He's not a religious man, but people believe he is. There's no reason to believe he cares about most of the populist agenda, unless doing so aids him personally, but people believe he does.
The scary thing here is, unlike the first time when Trump had people to real him back in, he doesn't now. If he's not demented, and therefore not capable of being removed, he can do pretty much any dumb thing he wants to over the next four years.
He's simply narcissistic and amoral.
Full bore narcissism and complete amorality is really rare. Even people that most other people accuse of narcissism are capable of at least some empathy.
Likewise, complete amorality is very rare as well. Even people with loose morals usually have some.
But not always, in either case.
Indeed, it's well know that psychopaths have no empathy for other people. And some of them, we'd note, are pretty smart. According to some, Julius Rosenberg, the Communist spy, was an example of all we've mentioned here. He was really smart and only cared about himself.
Trump was raised in an environment in which only success mattered and only money determined what was success. That was the Trump culture, and by all available evidence, Trump took to it and thrived in it.
Nothing other than Trump matters to Trump. That's pretty much it. And given that, cheating on spouses, dumping associates, switching positions, lying, and screwing the entire nation are okay if it benefits his view of himself.
And that explains why he completely baffles his opponents and why his admirers admire him. Those opposed to him cannot grasp how anyone can't see through Trump. Those who admirer him can't bring themselves to believe that he doesn't care about them whatsoever, or the country, or anything other than himself.
Normal people don't behave like Trump to that degree. Trump's an example of what the world would really be like if John Lennon's Imagine ruled the day.
Trump sees a world in which there are no values, no religion, and nothing, other than Trump getting all he can get.
I'd note, however, that in a way, Trump, if viewed this way, is the ultimate expression of his generation, the "Me Generation". Not everyone, or even most, in it, but the generational ethos as a whole. What matter was "me", not much else. Trump expresses an extreme form of that, even if he acquired it at home from a father who was definitely not part of that generation. That also makes it easier for his acolytes to vote for him, as some of them growing up sort of viewing the world that way themselves. Other, however, likely most, really believe that Trump cares about their cost of living, their pocketbooks, and making "American Great."
Well, as we know, Leopards won't eat my face.
He's a Goodfella
Not literally, but rather by association.
Trump developed his real estate business in New York at a time at which if you were going to get by, you were going to deal with the mob. If he has just as big of "big brain" as he claims, then he would have picked up how mobsters work, which to some extent is on bluff and threat.
The best example is from the movie The Godfather, which was closely based on the real behavior of the New York mafia. When they wanted Jack Wolz to do something, they put a severed horse's head, from a beloved horse, in his bed. Wolz, who wasn't harmed himself, caved to their demands.
Trump constantly makes bluffs and threats, and in fact quite often his adversaries give him what he wants. That may be his undignified and reprehensible negotiation style. If a person is immoral enough, and unprincipled enough, that works. . . right up until it doesn't.
There's no "art" to this deal. It's brutish.
And, of course, sooner or later, it doesn't work.
And when that day comes, you have no friends.
Indeed, somebody ought to give Trump the test now. When he says "I need this" somebody ought to say, come and get it.
Harold Hardrada asked Harold Godwinson "How much of England will you give me?". Godwinson replied "six feet, because you are bigger than other men". In this administration, and soon, somebody is going to tell Trump "fuck you, and the horse that you rode in on", and the whole bluff thing just goes down the tubes. Once you can't back a bluff up, it's implodes really quickly.
And then, you have no friends at all.
Here, for example, Denmark ought to tell the US to get its Space Farce base out within a few days. We'd have to. And if I governed Panama, the Canal would actually be run by the Chinese within a few days.
Whatcha Gonna About It?
Not much.
And his supporters?
They'll just all claim they were never actually for him.
That's not the only possibility.
The Kremlin Candidate
Trump is a Russian asset. The only question is, is he knowingly one, or not, and why.
It's worth noting that it would truly be a master stroke politically if you could get your man into the Oval Office, if you were one of our enemies. And then he could go about wrecking things on your behalf, destroying alliances, the economy and even simply our place in the world.
Nobody has every proven that Trump is a knowing Russian asset. He's definitely a Russian asset, to be sure, but it may simply be because of his view of the world and his childish admiration of strong men, and maybe his wanting to be one. Maybe its because on the eve of his own death, he wants to be remembered for something, and the only think he can think of is to be remembered as an American Napoleon.
But his relationship with the Russians has never been explained. Do they have something on him, and if so what?
Many have wondered about this very question, but nothing has been proven.
Still, he's successfully taken a page out of the Nazi Party's book and broad cast lies so consistently that large sections of the US population believe them. And now he's threatening our allies, and has to be taken seriously.
If Trump is a bought and paid for Russian asset, and largely only cares for himself, he's in an ideal position to simply bring the United States down. He can alienate our relationship with our allies, destroy our economy, leave us a wreck, and turn us against each other.
And that's the best evidence that he's a Russian asset. That's exactly what he's doing.
Soviet literacy poster.
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