Should We Think Of Trump As An Illiterate Buffoon Or As Someone With A Disability?

One of the reasons why I don't like using RealClearPolitics' polling averages is because they include Rasmussen, a company known for delivering polling numbers their clients pay for. But even with a ridiculous Rasmussen poll included, the RealClearPolitics polling average for Trump's job approval shows that just 45.2% of the electorate approves of the job he's doing, as opposed to 52.3% who don't. A more accurate poll, by Morning Consult in mid-December, shows that just 41% of registered voters approve and 56% disapprove. That 41% approve of the job Trump is doing is mortifying, not about Trump but about our countrymen.

David Graham's essay in Monday's Atlantic, The President Who Doesn't Read, might confirm your decision to oppose Trump. The the ignoramuses who approve of the job Trump is doing-- whether 41% or 45.2%-- actually like him more precisely because he is allergic "to the written word" and to them his reliance on oral communication is anything but a liability in office. He's just like they are, just like the moron they used to watch on that TV sitcom he presided over that caused them too aspire to be just like him-- and to vote for him.

In Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff wrote that Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time. Wolf: "He didn't process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate." Wolff quoted Gary Cohen: "It’s worse than you can imagine... Trump won’t read anything-- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored." Trump himself: "I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you."




Graham: "In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon." Trump prefers to absorb his information on TV-- especially on TV that talks admirably about him. Wolf painted an ugly picture: "If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls-- the phone was his true contact point with the world-- to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."

Trump has always loved the telephone: Stories of him calling business associates and friends, or reporters, whether under his own name or pseudonyms, litter his business career. (There are limitations, Wolff suggests: Aides found that Trump “could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.”) His conversations with friends are a crucial source of information and pressure release. Shortly after taking office, per The Times Trump told a friend, “I can invite anyone for dinner, and they will come!” The ability to invite-- and one presumes call-- anyone and have them reply flatters Trump’s ego and seems to be one of the few parts of his position that he enjoys.

In view of this oral fixation, Trump’s affection for Twitter is not as paradoxical as it seems. It requires only 140, and now 280, characters at a time, is often fed by what he’s watching on TV, and it is only outgoing: The president need not read himself to tweet effectively. The conversationality of Twitter fits his M.O., too. While Trump is billed as the author of many books, it’s clear he didn’t actually write them. Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz savaged him during the campaign, while Trump has blamed errors in other books on mysterious speechwriter Meredith McIver. It’s not like these books are great literary achievements, anyway. What Trump imparts to them is his conversational shtick. Unlike past presidents, there’s little evidence of a written record of letters or other correspondence, either. The paradigmatic Trump epistle is a cease-and-desist letter from counsel.

Trump’s particular affection for television is notable. As a Baby Boomer, he is a member of a generation raised on television and still especially fond of it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in Trump’s age cohort watch an average of four hours of television a day, meaning his reported four-to-eight-hour habit is only somewhat greater than the norm. But that demographic also spends the most leisure time reading-- almost an hour a day, per the BLS, by far the greatest of any age group.

There’s a reason so many 65-to-74-year-olds read a lot: Many of them are retired, and don’t have to do work. Trump, by contrast, has one of the most demanding jobs in the world. One reason that it’s demanding, however, is that the holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading, and there’s little to suggest that Trump is doing that. Instead, he has taken that time up with phone conversations, television, and golf, another forum for oral communication. (Per Philip Bump, Trump played golf every 4.7 days in 2017, good for 10 full 24-hour days and far higher than Obama’s rate as president.)

Trump denies this, of course. “All my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office-- in other words, when you're president of the United States,” he said earlier this year. “So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.”

The president's actions show little such sign of preparation and study, while displaying faulty understandings of many things. After visiting Saudi Arabia and hitting it off with the country’s leaders, he forcefully backed Riyadh in its dispute with Qatar and many other issues, over the objections of some of his staff-- even publicly contradicting Tillerson. In December, however, he suddenly became concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The minimal thought put into several of Trump’s core views on China became clear when President Xi Jinping was able to change his entire view of the Korean incident in 10 minutes-- 10 minutes of oral conversation, of course.

Then there was his more recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there. That decision was controversial but not without defenders, and the U.S. insisted the move did not settle the final status of Jerusalem in peace talks with the Palestinians. Apparently Trump did not get (or perhaps did not read) the memo, because in a tweet earlier this week he said that the U.S. had “taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table,” rattling both Israelis and Palestinians.

The refusal to read, and the resulting limits of Trump’s understanding of complicated issues, doesn’t mean that every decision he makes is bad. Indeed, it can be liberating-- allowing him to act on instinct, even in the face of expert reservations. My colleague Krishnadev Calamur, for example, writes that the anger that led the White House to freeze aid to Pakistan this week is understandable. But the shaky grasp of the underlying currents means Trump is more likely to blunder on any given case, and Trump’s misstatements and missteps earn him mockery and undermine his stature around the world.

Perhaps no single area better summarizes Trump’s strange tendency than his press shop. He was reportedly driven to distraction by Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s ill-fitting suits and bumbling demeanor, and eventually Spicer was pushed out in favor of Sarah Sanders, a calmer and more commanding force in the Brady Room. But in its written work, the White House press team continues to commit errors and gaffes and issue typo-flecked statements.

While most problems faced by presidential administrations are incredibly complex, the solution to problems caused by a president who does not read is fairly simple: He ought to start reading. Simple and easy are very different matters, though, and expecting a man who has always preferred chatting and watching television to the printed word to become a reader at 71 would be foolish. There’s no Trump pivot, especially not to the bookshelf.

Since we're talking about words, you can't imagine how excited I was the other day to see RJ Eskow did a Progressive's Guid To Corporate Dem-Speak. Unless is the first week you're reading DWT, you likely already know how insane it makes me to see people misuse words like "moderate" and "centrist." Eskow tackled the latter but not the former, presumably because it's the corporate media more than corporate Dems who are the culprits in the misuse of "moderate." Eskow introduced his piece by nothing that "Certain words and phrases are routinely used by 'centrist' political candidates. By design, these terms are imprecise, emotionally charged, and often self-contradicting. In fact, the word 'centrist' is just such a term, since polling shows that the economic viewpoint of these candidates-- especially regarding health care, Social Security, education and other social programs-- is often well to the right of the general public. In his guide to centrist terminology I had an initial impression that he was mostly thinking about Mayo Pete, until I read it a few times and realized it was primarily a critique of Status Quo Joe.

• Centrist: Someone who presents a corporate-friendly agenda with less fervor than the typical Republican, with a modest measure of regulation as demanded by circumstances and with a patina of social liberalism.

• Choice (when applied to a public good): A word used as an attempt to distract people from the flawed state of the American social contract by forcing them to choose from an array of semi-functional, overpriced private-sector products. This allows policymakers to subsidize private corporations at public expense, while at the same time providing the public with something that loosely resembles-- but is not-- a functioning social safety net.

• Compete (as in, “prepare workers of the future to compete”): A word used to describe what workers will be required to do to survive in the new, Randian economy. For example, to become competitive, workers are sometimes expected to run through a gauntlet of poorly conceived and insufficiently funded educational programs to re-train them for the “new economy” (defined below), often under the assumption that there is a secret app designer hiding inside every laid-off manufacturing employee. To “compete” after training, workers should be prepared to fight like crabs in a barrel for low-paying jobs that provide no employment security or benefits. (See also: “Jobs of the future,” defined below.)

• Free stuff: A term of contemptuous dismissal for public services that are commonly available in other developed countries, and which any decent society would make available to all human beings.

• Friend of mine (as in, “John McCain was a friend of mine”): A declaration of sentimental attachment not only to an individual across the aisle, but also to a long-passed era of comity between powerful individuals from both political parties. The term reflects an unwillingness to accept the cynicism and depravity of today’s GOP. It may also indicate a willingness to use “bipartisanship” as a cover for offering conservative policies by pretending they are needed to attract Republican votes (which they will not do).

• Health care consumers: People who are forced to choose from a bewildering array of inadequate private health options, based on future needs they can’t anticipate, as offered by private corporations that benefit financially by confusing them now and denying them medical care later. The word “consumers” allows policymakers to accuse individuals of not being “smart shoppers” when things go wrong, thereby deflecting blame away from both themselves and the corporations.

• “I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on bold ideas”: I don’t have any bold ideas.

• “I know how to get things done”: I intend to keep using a political approach that hasn’t gotten anything done for years.

• “I will not raise taxes one penny on the middle class”: I’ll let corporations keep ripping the nearly-vanished “middle class” off instead, charging people more than they’d pay in taxes while providing less in services-- and without public oversight or accountability.

• “I’m pragmatic”: I don’t believe that a country that won two world wars, rebuilt its economy with the New Deal after the Great Depression, created Medicare and Social Security, developed the internet at public expense, and sent several manned missions to the moon can do big things.

• “Ideology” (as in, “I don’t believe in rigid adherence to any political ideology”)" A pejorative term for principles and/or core values.

• “Jobs of the future”: Menial piecework tasks, parceled out through apps that force workers into 12-hour days in the hopes they can eke out a living through a lifetime of endless servility.

• “Managed competition”: Managed confusion. (See “Choice,” above.)

• “New economy”: Same as the old economy (circa 19th century), but the boss wears a turtleneck or a hoodie.

• “Our country needs to balance its budget like a family sitting around the kitchen table”:

Definition 1: I don’t understand how finance works.
Definition 2: I don’t want you to understand how finance works.

• “Pipe dream”: Any bold idea I don’t support.

• “Privatization”: Theft of public resources.

• “Public/private partnership”: See above; the exploitation of public resources for private profit.

• “Purity test”: Any belief or policy I won’t espouse because it would alienate my funders, but that I won’t openly oppose because it’s popular with voters. It implies that people who support it are rigid and unreasonable, rather than principled and thoughtful.

• “Reaching across the aisle”: A coded message to big-money donors that you will not fight for the policies you claim to believe in.

• “Realistic” (as in, “Your proposal (backed by a large majority of voters) isn’t realistic”): We don’t live in a functioning democracy and I don’t plan to do anything about it.

• “Rich kids/Trump’s kids” (as in, “I don’t want to give free college to Donald Trump’s kids”): 1) I believe that social program X is a commodity, not a public good; 2) if I really cared about economic inequality, I’d raise taxes on the Trumps of this world to pay for it, and 3) my logic could be applied to elementary schools, too, so I hope you don’t think about what I’m saying too much.

• “Something we can get done” (as in, “The public option is something we can get done”): A cautious proposal that can’t get passed as long as Republicans control the Senate, but will not inspire voters to turn the Senate Democratic. In other words, something that can’t get done.

• “Universal coverage”: The stated goal of providing every American with inadequate health insurance that ensures neither financial security nor decent medical care.

• “You can be progressive and practical at the same time”: I am neither progressive nor practical.

Yesterday the New York Times published their Of Course Bernie Can Win editorial-- and by Bret Stephens, no less. If you missed it, it's worth reading the whole thing. I'm sure the Biden and Trump campaigns did, carefully. It begins with a quote from Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. What's he got to do with feeling the Bern? "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-- and you are the easiest person to fool." The Times made that relevant to the 2020 election by revising it slightly: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself that Bernie Sanders can’t win-- not just the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency itself."

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

According to the theory, Sanders’s support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it’s also cultlike and off-putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly (even if he insists it’s of a more benign variety). He embraces nearly all of the same policies, like Medicare for all, that raised Elizabeth Warren high in the polls but are now dragging her down.

And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Didn’t Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideological affinities run in the same direction, just lead Britain’s Labour Party to disaster?

It all sounds superficially convincing-- and eerily familiar. It’s what many conservatives kept saying about Donald Trump around this time four years ago.

As with Sanders, Trump was seen as being way outside his party’s mainstream: a protectionist in a party of free traders; an isolationist in a party of interventionists; a libertine in a party of moralists. As with Sanders, Trump barely belonged to the party whose nomination he sought. As with Sanders, Trump’s message was that he was fighting a “rigged system.”

And as with Sanders, the ideological distaste for Trump among conservatives was matched to the conviction that he couldn’t possibly win. Let’s Elect Hillary Now, was the title of one conservative lament about the popularity of supposedly unelectable Republicans, written toward the end of 2015. I know the article well because I wrote it.

Trump won because he was willing to say loudly what his supporters believed deeply; because, in his disdain for what politicians are supposed to be and do, he exuded authenticity; because he was hated by the people his base found hateful; because he had an opponent who, in the minds of his supporters, epitomized corruption and self-dealing; and because he offered radical cures for a country he diagnosed as desperately ill. Despite being the oldest man ever elected president, he seemed (to his voters) fresh, true, bold, and sorely needed.

So it is, and would be, with Sanders. Depth of conviction? Check. Contempt for conventional norms? Check. Opposed by all the right people? Check. Running against a “crooked” opponent? Check. Commitment to drastic change? Check. Like Trump, too, he isn’t so much campaigning for office as he is leading a movement. People who join movements aren’t persuaded. They’re converted. Their depth of belief is motivating and infectious.

The strength of Sanders’s movement is reflected in his blowout fund-raising numbers-- nearly $100 million for 2019-- which only rose in the wake of his heart attack. If Sanders wins Iowa (where polls have him in a dead heat for first), and New Hampshire (where he has a slight lead), then the argument about his supposed non-electability will begin to crumble-- including among older black voters, who have so far been among Joe Biden’s most important pillars of support.

But even if Sanders won the nomination, how would he win the election? Perhaps more easily than people suspect.

Intensity among Democratic-leaning voters will never be greater. There will likely be no third-party challenger like Ralph Nader to shave his margin, or an influential “NeverSanders” wing among liberal pundits. He will find crossover support from former Trump voters in places like Ohio and Michigan, just as Trump found it from former Obama voters. To energize African-American support, he could choose Eric Holder or Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

Nor will scare tactics work any better against Sanders than they did against Trump. Overwrought comparisons with Hugo Chávez will wear thin, just as comparisons between Trump and Benito Mussolini did. The easiest move in American politics is to show yourself to be less scary than your caricature. Ronald Reagan’s devastating “There you go again” line against Jimmy Carter can be a Sanders quip, too.

Stephens concludes with some conservative nonsensical palaver but admits in the end, despite his own ideological preferences, that "To say Sanders is unelectable is indefensible." He's not quite ready-- nor will he ever be-- to agree that Bernie will be America's greatest leader-- only great leader-- since Franklin Roosevelt.