America has voted an idiot into the White House
Have we finally reached the point at which rational explanations serve no more purpose? It feels like that as I watch news anchors sigh and seasoned journalists grimace. Analysis from this point forward would not appear to make much sense. We have a President of the United States, under investigation by the FBI for alleged links to Russia, who fires the director of the FBI and then has a meeting with Russian officials (in the Oval Office, no less), from which the American media is barred but a photographer from the Russian state media is present. The President then boasts to his Russian guests about his intelligence sources, in the process compromising some highly top secret assets whose information had been passed to America by one of their closest allies.
That’s not even to mention the taped conversations, Twitter threats, strange business ties, nepotism in government, praise for brutal dictators, strategic incompetence, and the complete lack of leadership in nearly every area of government. Let’s not even dwell on the various moods, such as the brooding sulk he was in when he met Chancellor Merkel compared with those big dumb grins that fill the frame in all his photos with the Russian Foreign Minister and ambassador.
One might attempt to set all of this into some larger geopolitical argument about America’s relationship with Russia, maybe positioning Russia as a counter to the possibility of an emerging hyperpower in the form of China. Perhaps Russia, so fiercely opposed to the spread of Islamism, might be seen as the natural ally to the President who has made it one of his key objectives to bomb the you-know-what out of IS. Perhaps one might even argue that this narrative of the unstable President is part of some high level game of brinksmanship with North Korea; that these ruses are meant to make the North Korean leadership wary of provoking America.
Nobody could blame you if none of those explanations seem convincing. You might then prefer to labour under the suspicion that Trump’s mistakes are part of a clever defence strategy come the looming impeachment. Trump is forgetting and bumbling because this will form the basis of his senility defence. When the investigation gets too close to the President, Trump might escape prosecution as so many elderly defendants have done in the past, by claiming that he wasn’t aware of what he’s doing.
Yet, really, we’re probably beyond explanations grounded in reason. They don’t actually account for the most likely explanation for what’s going on.
America has voted an idiot into the White House.
Normally, resorting to such language is no more than an ad hominem attack when a person doesn’t wish to present a more rounded case. From the beginning, when journalists mocked Trump, I argued that his bid should be taken seriously. I could see what effect he was having on crowds. I also understood American voters’ anger with traditional politics. With President Trump, however, there’s are no more rounded argument to make. We no longer need the experts in political science to explain what’s happening. Donald Trump is simply a bad president and a not particularly bright man. He was elected because of his bellicose character, which we now see actually benefits from his lack of intelligence. His insults, his anger, his rambling stories, laced with anecdotes, were all crowd-pleasers but the truth is that there was never a particularly sharp intelligence behind them. Where we went wrong was in thinking there was going to be a “pivot” (how I now hate that word) because, we thought, President Trump would be governed by the same logic that governs all politics. Our mistake was thinking that Donald Trump was political. He wasn’t. He never produced coherent policies beyond some broad promise that “we’ll fix it, folks”.
The simple fact is that America voted an idiot into the White House.
He doesn’t read and obviously doesn’t learn. He makes pronouncements based on sketchy – sometimes inaccurate – details. Despite his condemning serious newspapers as “fake news”, there is nobody in a position of power in the world more likely to respond to actual fake news – that is often deliberately placed in front of him. He makes judgements, sometimes involving the lives of serious, brave, and committed men and women, without the due care that presidents should exercise. He makes these mistakes not because he’s malicious but because he’s too ignorant to comprehend the consequences. He simply lacks the aental facilities to understand his duties as president – that critical intelligence that would make him aware of his own excesses of character and enable him to moderate his behavior because of that.
He makes these errors because America has voted an idiot into the White House.
No matter how we attempt to dress this up in terms of psychology, politics, or even the cult of celebrity in which he has always been invested, the fact that Trump is simply unsuited to his role does not go away. His presidency is marked by imbecility of the highest order and will go down in history as the blackest page in American democracy (so far). It might be the case that illegal acts will lead to his downfall but, today, it looks like the greater reason for his removal would be incapacity. Laws and rules will no doubt be written to prevent another man like Donald J. Trump from entering the White House. He might not be the last bad President of America but, hopefully, he should be the last idiot that Americans are allowed to elect.
David Waywell is a writer and cartoonist whose new book, The Secret Life of Monks, is now available.