The Art of the Dunce

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How can you tell that Donald Trump is an idiot?  It’s simple.  He volunteers that information consistently.  Donald Trump has a book titled, “The Art of the Deal”.  That book was ghost written.  

Trump has begun to whisper, “I’m an idiot”.  

Listen to him.  Are you not convinced?  Ok.  What is, “The Art of the Deal”, about?  Is it about making “deals”?  No.  It is basically about manipulating the end process of deal-making to get a better deal on your end.  Trump has cleared his throat and is plainly speaking that he is an idiot.  His book about deal making is not about deal making.  He has demonstrated that his ‘genius’ in making deals requires that someone else know the way to make deals, and to enter the negotiation at the end and simply walk away.  He does not require, nor does he desire the knowledge of the dispute in its details.  He just needs to have authority to sign off on the details, and then refuse to do so, getting his opponents to offer more.  

Trump has one move.  That move is to be rigid.  He has said so.  In any deal where Trump is involved, Trump’s opposition must believe that Trump has some authority.  Without that, Trump has no capacity to use facts, reasoning, or the lay of the land to make acceptable conditions for those across the table.  How do we know what?  He has told us so.  At this point, Trump is banging his little balled fists on the table screaming his lack of sophistication.  “I’m an idiot, I’m an idiot”, he keeps screaming.  “I don’t need to know how the details.  My lawyers handle that.  All I need to do is leave once an agreement is reached.  How do you know that?  I told you.  I wrote a book about it.”  (Not really, of course.  It was written for him. That’s part of the point). 

If you care to listen, Trump always tells us that he is an idiot, while he is telling us of his genius.  While he was President, Donald Trump said that the debt ceiling was “sacred”.  In and of itself, that’s an idiotic statement for an American President, and for a variety of reasons.  But, let’s isolate the most important one.  The lack of flexibility of that position is deadly.  Rigidity on both sides can only have two possible outcomes.  The first possibility is lack of agreement on a solution.  The second is war.  Trump requires those around him to know what they are doing because his role requires that he does not know.  He has to be reliably intransigent.  Again, how do we know that?  We know that because he told us.  He wrote a book about it.  (Well, not really…). 

A couple of weeks ago, during our most recent debt ceiling negotiation, Trump advised, “if {the GOP} doesn’t get massive concessions, you’ll have to do a default”. This conflicts with his earlier position of the paying the debts as being “sacred”, notwithstanding the idiotic phrasing.  This contradiction is a national broadcast on all available channels that Trump doesn’t have a clue of what he is talking about.  It is on blast from coast to coast, to all American territories, and to all ships at sea.  “I’m an idiot”, he keeps saying.   He said that unless you give massive concessions, he will burn the deal down.  He has said so before.  He has done so before.  He has never had another play.  

And finally, what happens when you give an idiot all of the details required to take action?  What does the idiot decide and then put into action?  The answer to that is nothing.  An idiot lacks the ability to take a good plan and implement it.  The recent example of that is the secret document that Trump purloined from the White House regarding the war plan against Iran.  (All of this is from speculation in the media). Trump had the information within the document about what that war would require.  All Trump had to say was, ‘do this’, as it were.  Remember “The Art of the Deal”?  That ‘art’ is predicated on not doing anything.  That ‘art’ is about stopping the action.  A war like the one he sought against Iran could not be started by stopping.  The war against Iran did not ensue, and thank goodness for that.  A very intelligent General determined that Trump could not do…with the necessary information.  Trump cannot decide.  Trump cannot make…as it were.  Trump can only destroy.  

So, as an idiot would, Trump stole the document with hopes of shaming the General about why a war did not ensue with Iran.  It’s hard to see what the idiot Trump hoped to gain from this idiotic move, because the value of it only exists within the mind of an idiot.  He may, God willing, finally be in legal jeopardy that will not release from him.  Conceptually similar to the Peter Principle of rising to the level of his incompetence, Trump has failed and artfully dealt his way down to the level of his criminal culpability.  He sought shame for a General, and by doing nothing but stealing a classified document, he has earned a historic idiocy that will rival Nero.  

Remember when he said that in order to de-classify a document, all he had to do was think about it?  That is either wrong, or he merely failed to do so, and rendered criminality unto himself.  His plan, such that it was, actually required that the document remain classified as a secret.  His revenge against the General required that secrecy.  So, this is self-immolation.  By not hatching, or half-hatching his plan, and doing nothing toward his desired goal, he accomplished nothing but criminal culpability.

Conversely, President Biden desired, sought, and achieved a debt ceiling deal.  He knew what he was doing, and he facilitated deal-making.  That deal was signed and the economy was protected.  There is not much said about how this process works.  It is a kind of horse treading, or sausage making, and it lacks the pizzaz of Trump’s “Art of the Deal”.  Trump will likely be the first American President to be convicted of espionage.  He is speaking to the ages now.  He is saying, “I am an idiot.”  

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