Occam's Razor

One of last week’s biggest stories was of course the “infrastructure” meeting between Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at the White House. It quickly blew up when Trump took offense at remarks Pelosi made earlier in the day when she accused Trump of a cover up.

His blow up looked quite staged since minutes later he was at a podium in the Rose Garden with preprinted signs that seemed to match the occasion. Also suspicious was an image captured by a photographer of Trump’s handwritten notes (written in Sharpie, of course) with prominent misspellings. Among other misspellings he noted that Democrats have “no achomlisments”.

Trump’s typos are hardly news, but these handwritten notes prove Trump is a very poor speller. He also has very poor grammar. He confuses words. On April 2^nd, Trump was ranting about House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. He repeatedly used “oranges” when he should have used the word “origins”. Trump’s speaking is full of malapropisms. It doesn’t seem to bother his supporters. Should it bother the rest of us?

It should bother all of us because Trump is functionally illiterate. I know what you are thinking, “But what about all those tweets? He types them himself.” They tend to have occasional errors but most of the time the grammar and spelling is correct. And this is because his Twitter client points these out and suggests the correct spelling or grammar to use. We all do this, at least if we care about what we post online. Trump though sometimes slips up.

In 2016, The Washington Post compared the grammar and vocabulary levels of the major candidates at the time. Trump’s was at the bottom of the bunch: with a less than 8^th grade vocabulary and less than 6^th grade grammar. His speech is confusing, to say the least. My daughter does voice captioning for a living. She sometimes has to caption Trump live. Closed captioners hate translating Trump because he rarely speaks in compete sentences. Where do you place the period? It’s so hard to tell. But also, his “sentences” are rarely coherent and veer from place to place. It’s a sign of a very disordered mind that cannot think linearly.

Trump is not illiterate in the sense that he can’t read. But he can’t comprehend much of what he reads. No doubt every textbook he encountered during his education was a challenge. He misses a lot of nuance. In response, he basically doesn’t read and depends on TV and radio for information. That’s why he’s so anxious to hustle out of a meeting to watch Fox News instead: TV is the equivalent of his reading time. That’s why his staff stopped giving him briefing materials. At best he gets a one-page bullet summary of key points. Mostly he wants you to tell him information. Since it appears he is easily distracted, it’s unclear how much of what he hears he actually absorbs. To compensate, he declares himself an “extremely stable genius” and proudly proclaims most decision are made from gut feelings instead of, you know, absorbing the complex and nuanced information that staff could provide to him.

Lots of us share Trump’s disability, which may explain in part why so many people relate to him. Like him, they got through life by overcompensating in other areas and hoping that makes the difference. What his disability reveals though is a man who is far from an “extremely stable genius”. If he can’t master basic grammar and vocabulary, he’s hardly smart by any conventional definition and can’t understand a lot of the material given to him. This means he’s woefully uninformed about the many issues he has to confront and decide on as president. As for stable, someone who huffs out of a meeting after only a few minutes is hardly stable. No wonder Nancy Pelosi is openly calling for an “intervention”. I’m not sure though that Trump understands what that means. It’s one of these words with lots of syllables.

If you are functional illiterate, it means that you grasp most of the basics of reading but lack much of the ability to process and integrate the written word. And that describes Donald Trump’s entire career. It’s not just anyone who can lose a billion dollars over ten years, most of it his father’s money. But you can if you don’t know what you are doing, you can’t read a balance sheet and you run your business by talking to people on the phone instead of absorbing yourself in the minutia of your business.

It also explains why he is stonewalling Congress and blocking any attempts to reveal these underlying falsehoods. No wonder his former attorney Michael Cohen spent a lot of time sending threatening letters to places like Wharton, warning them not to publish Trump’s grades. His career is a cavalcade of false fronts. It doesn’t take too many of these to unmask this Lone Ranger for the fraud he is.

With so many potential vulnerabilities, his luck won’t hold on forever. This is why he finds being dictator much more appealing than being president: no accountability ever! Fortunately for him, the Republican Party is totally on board, because it too projects a different image of what it claims to be compared to what it actually is. It’s unclear though when he is finally unmasked – when his taxes returns show him to be the cheat that he is and his grades prove he is the ignoramus we also know he is – whether it will make a difference.

Until then we continue to have a government led by the most ignorant person ever to hold the office. We have to hope that our constitutional government can somehow survive it.