I am on the road again, now in southwestern Kansas with my wife Deb. As the Trump campaign runs into more obviously Hindenburg-like territory, I’ll try to catch up with some reflections on what the Trump era has meant, whatever might be the future of his candidacy.
Let’s start with some responses on “does Trump think”?
1. Consider Nick Saban. Someone who will be voting for the first time writes:
I just graduated from high school, and for people my age this is generally the first election anyone has paid attention to. Rather an interesting way to get introduced to politics.
A reader on the latest "Does Trump Think?" installment pointed out that, in his view, the other readers (and you) considered yourself the high-and-mighty, looking down on Trump and his supporters with disdain. This is a legitimate danger, and certainly is the case from time to time.
Yet, that doesn't suddenly nullify the fact that the presidency requires a certain set of skills that Trump hasn't been shown to possess. Nick Saban's an incredible coach; you think he's great because of his ability to pump up his team with pep talks? Maybe he gives amazing speeches, but that's entirely unrelated to his ability to study the next opponent, choose his starters, pick plays, decide what to drill, etc. Above all else, the President of the United States has to be nice. [JF note: What the reader calls “nice” is what I think of as an advanced ability to imagine how an adversary might be thinking and feeling, so as to give offense only when that is exactly what you intend to do.] Why? World leaders are surprisingly fickle people (like all of us), and the slightest offense can hurt the United States abroad and at home. Trump is like the guy at the movies who yells "NO!" when the protagonist's lover dies. Sure, he's saying what he thinks, but that doesn't mean everyone needs to hear it.
2. Liberals crying wolf. A reader says that liberals have sneered so much at “uninformed” conservatives that they’ve out of terms for a person who really doesn’t know anything:
The dissenting opinion in your "Does Trump Think" column (part three) was misguided in a lot of ways but brought up an interesting point. There's something that I think could inform how people who think Trump is truly dangerous (like myself) choose to engage with the situation.
Liberals (in general - not you or your readers in particular) have a hard time reconciling why Trump supporters can't see how truly vacuous and without substance he is. Obviously the primary responsibility for this lies with those supporters, but we could be playing a much bigger part in bringing them to the light if our credibility weren't somewhat shattered. And we made that bed.
Republicans for about twenty five years have thrown knee jerk insults at democrats that all relate to elitism and common sense. Liberals' compliment to this tendency is to insult the intelligence of conservatives. Ronald Reagan was stupid, George Bush was stupid, and Sarah Palin was stupid. George Bush made bad decisions and was not ridiculed as ineffective or poorly informed but as an absolute imbecile (I read a somewhat silly study where someone had attempted to estimate presidential IQs by statements in the public record and Bush was on the low end of presidents with a 135 - which is borderline genius level IQ.
This is obviously a silly undertaking but it illustrates the point that a person who we reflexively insult and call an absolute idiot is probably an incredibly intelligent and competent man who just didn't do his best work as president.) Sarah Palin is another case of a clearly intelligent and savvy woman who was woefully unprepared but ridiculed as stupid. [JF note: as I wrote many times during his tenure, I thought that George W. Bush was not “stupid” in any normal sense. Rather I thought he had a combination of ignorance, in the sense of not being broadly informed; lack of curiosity, which limited his ability to correct the ignorance problem; and a desire to be, or at least seem, decisive, rather than risk seeming “hesitant” or “vacillating.” The combination was toxic in the rush toward war in Iraq.]
We have now cried wolf. Someone has now come along who is so obviously completely without the mental equipment to do this job and our criticism falls on deaf ears. We have taught his supporters that we can't be trusted to make that assessment objectively.