Stupid is as stupid does.
—Forrest Gump
Don’t forget that Trump is incredibly ignorant and stupid.
An awareness of what we are dealing with.
There has often been this desire by the media, columnists, and talking heads to paint President Trump as being cunning, and clever. He is not. Let’s not make this overly complicated; Donald Trump is a total moron.
How did this idiot beat all the other candidates? Trump is the terminal point of feeding half the nation a toxic stew of lies, conspiracy theories, and a rhetoric of fear. Trump is a lucky idiot.
“I have a very good brain and I’ve said lots of things.”
—D. Trump
The president has the attention span of a drunk fruit fly. White House aides say when they give him briefing memos they have to insert his own name into security briefings to hold his attention! When he goes to foreign countries, leaders are told to keep speeches two to four minutes long, so they don’t overload him with information or lose his interest.
Incredibly, Trump’s stupidity is part of his appeal. He has dumb, simple ideas. Ban all Muslims. Build a wall. Bomb North Korea. These are the kind of ideas that would occur to a child. That makes them easy to stick in the minds of ignorant voters. Unfortunately, they are also incredibly dumbed-down, oversimplified approaches to complicated problems. Trump’s dumbness is his appeal to his base; they understand him because stupid is never complicated, it’s simple and easy to understand. It also doesn’t get much accomplished, because reality is more complicated than a sound-bite slogan. Or as Trump said: “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
We have to take the real, pressing, and complicated issues like health care, global warming, immigration, and global terrorist threats, and figure out how to explain our solutions and tactics for handling these problems in simple ways, in ways that even a fourth grader can understand, because otherwise too many people will go with the oversimplified versions offered by idiots like Trump. I’m not trying to insult the intelligence of the American people. I think it’s actually more a matter of there being so much going on in the world today, from science, to politics, to culture and technology; it’s impossible for anyone to be an expert in all of it. That’s why we need experts, people who specialize in a given area, but we need the ideas of experts to be accessible to all. Enough people have to be familiar enough with the facts to recognize Trump for the dunce he is. Trump is a dingbat, a knuckledragger, a cretinous clown, a laughingstock, a moronic airhead, a self-obsessed bimbo.
While the fact that Trump is a loudmouth halfwit reminds us we can outsmart him, we must also keep in mind the serious danger that comes from having a dumb man-child in charge of a situation as beyond his understanding as running a country or handling international diplomacy. He is incredibly out of his depth, and this fact should remind us why resistance to Trump is so important. Leaving an idiot in charge of foreign policy is a dangerous game. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this better than Trump’s warmongering with North Korea. Then he does a complete about-face and says he’s willing to have direct talks with Kim Jong-un. Since Trump is neither a man of peace nor diplomacy, I would not hold out much hope for those direct talks.
Trump’s stupid and belligerent pestering of North Korea could very well bring about a completely unnecessary war where thousands of lives are lost. If the US attacked North Korea the imbalance of force would lead to a devastating and inhumane global catastrophe. With North Korea’s potential development of nuclear missiles, Trump’s ham-fisted handling of a delicate situation threatens to set off a nuclear conflict. Direct talks will not help matters unless Trump can conduct them with genuine good faith, which is almost impossible to imagine.
Threatening violence is never the best option for solving anything, and direct talks would normally be the right thing to do, but it is hard to imagine Trump accomplishing anything that way, although a different leader could. Calling the unpredictable dictator of a foreign nation “short and fat” is historically bad statecraft, to put it mildly. North Korea has offered to suspend their nuclear testing program if America agreed to stop running war games in South Korea. China has also backed this strategy. These war games are a needless provocation. Trump’s strategy for handling North Korea is like pestering a small but dangerous rattlesnake. Rather than seek a peaceful solution, Trump continually fans the flames and raises the possibility of starting a fire that could quickly spread out of control and cause unimaginable violence and damage. It’s a tragedy in the making, that this man is in control of the military and of the nuclear launch codes.
Trump has threatened North Korea repeatedly, making ominous threats like “they may not be around much longer.” In 2017, they famously began engaging in insults, like the pair of overgrown fifth-grade bullies they are, with Trump calling Kim “Rocket Man,” and Kim calling Trump “mentally deranged US dotard.” Is this what international diplomacy has come to? We need grown-ups to take charge.
It would be funny if it were not so scary, we are watching these reckless adult men bluster like idiotic drunks before a bar fight, but the stakes are the lives of hundreds of thousands, thermonuclear war, and conceivably a global war. Remember that it only took the shooting of the duke of a small Austro-Hungarian country to spark off World War I. Who knows the ultimate consequences at stake if the United States becomes involved in a military invasion of North Korea, all because our elected leader can’t stop tweeting third-grader-level insults. If anything, this should serve as a reminder of how big the stakes are for our resistance and how every day matters when it comes to the safety of everyone alive.
It would be difficult for a president to do more damage to America’s standing and reputation on the international stage if they tried. Trump attacks allies who have faithfully sided with the United States since World War II, while praising dictators past and present like Rodrigo Duterte, Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein. While American officials say Putin’s Russia is America’s largest geopolitical threat, Trump praises Putin constantly. Gestures such as this have long-term, serious political consequences.
Every single nation in the world is a part of the Paris climate accord to fight climate change except for America, because of Donald Trump. Trump ended any chance of America brokering peace in the Middle East by going against decades of American policy and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Trump tried to shake down NATO members for payments as if America were running a mafia protection racket. He decertified the Iran deal, which allies and the US had negotiated to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He has weakened our relationship with long-term allies, such as Germany. Once we were seen as the foundation of the international, peace-oriented order. Now we are seen as an unpredictable loose cannon.
While Trump’s petulant strongman baby act may fool his base, it is not fooling anyone on the global stage. German officials find Trump’s lack of basic foreign knowledge frightening, and it seems the president cannot meet with a foreign leader without embarrassing the office of the president, yanking and squeezing the hands of foreign leaders like an insecure loser, shoving international leaders like an uncivilized thug, and undercutting American diplomacy and international policy with his Diet Coke–fueled Twitter binges. Foreign leaders realize that despite his bluster, it is surprisingly easy to get the better end of the deal when negotiating with Trump; all that is necessary is to impress him with flattery, a military parade, or some shiny object. Republican politicians who excuse this behavior try to act as if the words of the president don’t matter—which is untrue. For example, Trump offended America’s closest ally, Britain, by tweeting inflammatory anti-Muslim hate propaganda videos taken from a fringe ultranationalist British hate group, supposedly showing Muslims committing acts of violence, such as a video entitled “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches,” when in fact the assailant was neither Muslim nor a migrant. When Britain’s leader condemned Trump for spreading hate, the president then attacked her on Twitter as well. Because he is a giant ass.
Which is why Britain and other world leaders see Trump for what he is, even if a quarter of our own population cannot. It will take years, and much work, to undo the damage caused by this presidency to America’s place in the world. As David Lammy, member of the British Parliament, wrote, “The President of the United States is promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate group whose leaders have been arrested and convicted. He is no ally or friend of ours.” It is important that we let our allies know we too recognize Trump for what he truly is: an idiot.