We are still giving Donald Trump too much credit
After all these years – all these eras, all these campaigns, all these election cycles – we are still giving Donald Trump too much credit.
I, like 37 million others, watched the former president’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Podcast, and for all the talk of Rogan platforming dangerous voices, he actually did the world a favour: unwittingly exposing Trump, once and for all, as a vacuous vessel devoid of substance.
Tomes have been written psychoanalysing Trump. Documentaries have chronicled his every tic and tweet. The world’s most powerful country has spent the best part of a decade agog and aghast at his cult of personality. But all of those commentaries employ a cerebral intellect unwarranted by the subject. Ultimately, Trump is a blank, simplistic man whose emphatic thoughtlessness is unworthy of the verbose critiques we continuously concoct.
Just think of every label typically attributed to Trump. Racist. Xenophobic. Transphobic. Misogynistic. Divisive. Most are rhetorically true, in the sense that the words he spews can be accurately described as such, but any accusation of pre-meditation pertaining to Trump – any suggestion that he intentionally stands for anything – is incredibly generous. Too generous, actually. The guy is a reactive, spontaneous spitballer immune to preparation. He opens his mouth, terrible things come out, and he is as surprised as the rest of us. To ascribe him intent born of contemplation or conviction is to overestimate an imbecile.
While attempting to mobilise the progressive vote, it is common for liberal commentators to warn of Trump’s cunning, calculating plans to strategically seize control. Michael Moore considers Trump ‘smarter’ than Democrats. Ezra Klein says we do not have the ‘vocabulary’ to understand Trump’s novel thinking. Liz Cheney brands Trump ‘vindictive.’ Such assessments are paranoid, melodramatic and – above all else – inaccurate. They overstate the aptitude of an airhead.
In reality, Donald Trump is incapable of being those things – the strategic opportunist, the insidious plotter, the sagacious mastermind. The guy cannot hold one coherent thought in his head for more than 10 seconds without diverting to random, nonsensical tangents, as captured perfectly by Rogan’s inadvertent three-hour time capsule. Tweety Bird lives in Trump’s head, and Tweety Bird is no political schemer.
Even the Project 2025 scare is overblown. If you sat Trump in a room, alone, for a day, and asked him to turn a blank piece of paper into a cogent roadmap for the implementation of his supposed ideology, he would return an illegible mess. Sure, there may be an Elon Musk rocket carved in crayon, and his much-practiced signature scrawled in the bottom corner, but anything amounting to policy would never materialise.
‘But he is a billionaire,’ we are repeatedly informed, as if the high-wire maintenance of generational wealth translates, intellectually, to the smooth running of an entire nation. In actuality, of course, different Trump businesses have declared bankruptcy on six separate occasions, while his latest financial filings reported up to $455 million in liabilities. Without the army of handlers and advisors in his employ, Trump would be exposed as an incapable fraud, and no propaganda can alter that.
Just look at the guy giving a speech. We, as viewers, get to see, in real time, his reaction to whatever is written on the teleprompter. He reads the auto-queue then branches off into ineloquent non-sequiturs steeped in ‘alternative facts’ and the residue of conspiracy. Such instinctive, unhinged commentary is the closest we ever come to learning what Trump really thinks, and it is mostly illogical gibberish.
Indeed, right from the start of his absurd political experiment, Trump has been a blank canvas onto which anything and everything could be projected. From libertarian bureaucracy-buster to anointed evangelical saviour, we have seen it all – Trump as whatever is deemed expedient.
At first, Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes commandeered Trump as the public face of their alt-right agenda. Then, conservative shock jocks exploited Trump’s untenanted ethos to make him a fleshy fulcrum of their conservative fever dreams. And finally, the MAGA masses placed Trump upon an indemnifying pedestal, high above the altar – Teflon Don a permitting arbiter of their hate-filled desires in return for narcissistic supply.
This is all rather ironic, of course, considering Trump’s relentless references to Washington stiffs and deep state puppets. He is part of the swamp – described, defined and deployed by those who really hold power. In some senses, then, Trump is a victim, quite remarkably, but he doesn’t even know it. So long as enough people massage his enormous ego, he will continue to be manipulated – bent into grotesque shapes like a giant wad of orange play dough.
At one point, it was common to call Trump a political chameleon. After all, he donated extensively to Democrats for three decades, and occasionally espoused views that were – perhaps unknowingly – moderate. In truth, though, Trump has always been politically vacant – too uninformed to hold original opinions, and capriciously amenable to whichever subservient man’s man has his ear at a given time.
To wit, even now, just seven days from his third general election, we do not really know what Trump thinks about abortion, or healthcare, or diplomacy. And we do not know because he does not know. He does not have the cognitive capacity, nor the emotional self-discipline, to understand or study such complex topics, let alone form rational opinions about them. Hence monosyllabic self-congratulation. Hence rudimentary points tethered to reductionist dick-measuring. Hence thought-terminating clichés that derail every interview.
Some say he does this deliberately, that his appeal lies in a gift to take esoteric subjects and make them digestible to the layman. Locker room talk, indeed. Straight-shooting, tell-it-how-it-is Don. And while I can see the theoretical appeal of such a laconic, relatable leader, Donald Trump is not it. He is not the populist demagogue portrayed by a loquacious commentariat. In fact, he probably could not spell ‘populism,’ much less enact it. Again, any allegations of philosophical forethought are astoundingly munificent.
To that end, I think people often get so caught up in it all – the shock, the awe, the outrage – that they make grandiose assessments of Trump unmoored from his reality. The idea of Trump – what we have learned to think he represents – lives rent free in the collective zeitgeist. Meanwhile, the actual man is so intellectually bare – so moronic and empty – that his continuous hold on the public pulse strains credulity.
From my vantage point, an ocean away, Trump’s idiocy stands in stark contrast to the nuanced, academic panic that trails in his wake. And while it is easy to discard Americans as gullible for making this juvenile buffoon the recipient of more presidential election votes than anybody, ever, I instead have sympathy for those addled souls. They have been brainwashed by the cult.
And so, as the hours tick by to another momentous election, and as the polls continue to narrow, I do worry about the future of America. Not because of Trump, necessarily, but because of those who pull his strings. They made Donald Trump, built him into the political blank page we see today, and they will stick around long after he expires. They are the danger, not him. For without them, he is nothing.