Profoundly stupid and very pissed
Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, didn’t breast feed him, poor thing. Maybe why he’s so needy. And Papa Fred? Well, he wanted eldest son Fred Trump Jr. to take over the family’s real estate empire. But Fred Jr. said screw that. He wanted to get out from under Dad’s imperious thumb and become a commercial pilot. He did. So Fred Sr. had to settle for his second son, Donald, the unruly idiot they had to send to off military school where he received a “five-year lesson in bullying.” But not before Fred instilled in him that there were only two kinds of people in the world: killers and losers.
Donald famously avoided the draft by finding a doctor who would diagnose bone spurs. Donny sneaked his way into Wharton Business School, niece Mary Trump alleges in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” by enlisting “Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him.”
Per a second-hand account, William T. Kelley, a former marketing professor at the Wharton, said “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.”
“I strongly suspect that he had a relationship with his father that accounts for a lot of what he became,” Tony Schwartz, who co-authored “The Art of the Deal” with Trump, told PBS Frontline.
Trump’s “surrogate father,” former HUAC attorney Roy Cohn schooled the insecure and undereducated heir in bluster and bullying after their meeting in 1973.
His taste, or lack of it, is seen again in Trump Tower and what he’s done to the Oval Office and the White House Rose Garden. It’s legendary:
In the documentary Trump: What’s the Deal?, a designer who once worked for the real estate mogul relates how Trump couldn’t comprehend why 200 year-old, Louis XVI furniture he saw at Christie’s was so expensive. He insisted he could have it reproduced for much less. As the designer tells it, Trump’s sister-in-law (who worked there) said, “Donald, you’re just never going to understand, are you?”
We learned in 2018 that Papa Fred, along with teaching Donny all his tax avoidance tricks, that Fred had to keep bailing out his failson’s businesses. Donny couldn’t even make a go running casinos.
We could go on. Donald Trump has been a laughingstock in New York City for decades, long before being the butt of jokes from Seth Meyers and Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. David Letterman ran a segment I must have missed in 2004. “Trump Or Monkey?” inspired this morning’s rant.
The chip on Donny’s shoulder has been growing since his youth. It’s made him vengeful toward critics (especially those who mock him), a sucker for vapid flattery, and insistent on seeing others bow before him. But he’s grown no smarter. What skills he has stem from resentment and feral instinct.
S.V. Date brings receipts over at Huffington Post. For example, Trump’s hydrologically impossible claim that he opened a huge valve to send water from Canada to fight Los Angeles wildfires:
University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning, one of the co-discoverers of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” that describes how some people with little competence in any specific field nevertheless overestimate their level of expertise, said he was hard-pressed to explain Trump’s belief that water from Canada somehow flows to California, except for their relative placement on a standard map of North America.
“People take things they know and misapply them,” Dunning said. “In his case, north is up and south is down, and I’m guessing here, because water flows down, if he opens up the tap, water will flow down from Canada to irrigate the crops in California.”
The 47th president believes “comically incorrect” ideas and then clings to them in the face of all logic and evidence. Because he’d look stupid?
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”
Of course, there’s more.
“He can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood,” said John Bolton, who served as one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term and who was recently raided by the FBI following his repeated criticisms of Trump on television. “A lie is knowing something is not true and saying it anyway. For Trump, it’s sort of what he wants it to be, and he kind of makes up things.”
We have Norman Vincent Peale to thank for Trump’s magical belief that he can bend reality to his will.
That may be giving Trump too much credit for actually thinking.
Former top aides from his first term in office famously made their views known to one another to describe their boss. Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly said Trump had the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” while chief of staff John Kelly once called him an “idiot.”
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to have called him a “moron,” which was clarified later as a “fucking moron.”
Author and commentator Fran Lebowitz opined in 2018, two years before Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19, “Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”
Trump is Wharton’s most innumerate graduate, as Date recounts:
More recently, Trump has taken to claiming that he will reduce the price of prescription drugs by mathematically impossible amounts.
“We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30 or 40%, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,” he said at a July reception for Republican members of Congress.
For Trump’s claim to be correct, pharmacies would have to refund many times the value of a prescription each time they filled one. A medication costing $100, for instance, would have to be handed to the patient at no charge along with $1,400 in cash.
Farce, tragedy or both
“I’ve come to accept how morally depraved Donald Trump is. But I’ll never get over how blindingly imbecilic he is,” attorney George Conway remarked in response to Date’s essay.
This country’s founders were perhaps the world’s most educated people of their day.
James Madison wrote in 1822, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowlege will for ever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Men like Madison could not conceive that their grand experiment in popular sovereignty might be ended by a man so profoundly stupid and placed in office by people who’ve disarmed themselves of knowledge. All with chips on their shoulders the size of Manhattan.
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