Your President Is Unwell

To understand Trump's Liberation-Day trade policy, don't consult an economist. Consult a gerontologist.

The comedian Frank Fontaine (1920-1978) as “Crazy Guggenheim.”

My brother-in-law Tom, who is a former magazine editor, complains to me that the press is “determinedly vague, not clear and direct,” on the question of whether our commander in chief has all his marbles.

I try to drop in wherever I can that even before his current term Donald Trump was quite visibly impaired by malignant narcissism. There’s also the matter of Trump’s functional illiteracy; his first ghostwriter Tony Schwartz has written that the man “is incapable of reading a book, much less writing one.” On that point Trump himself, when queried in 2016, seemed to suggest he did not read books, as the New Republic’s Alex Shephard noted at the time. “I read passages,” Trump said, “I read areas, chapters, I don’t have the time.” Whenever Trump is asked what his favorite book is he names All Quiet On the Western Front, an antiwar novella published a century ago. It’s such a weird choice that probably he did read it. My guess is that he was made to read it while he was a cadet at New York Military Academy. But it’s doubtful Trump has read many books since.

Trump’s mental state is further compromised by age-related cognitive decline. There were strong signs of this already in Trump’s first term. The medical news site Stat documented that Trump’s vocabulary had shrunk and his syntax grown more awkward compared to his speech patterns in the 1980s and 1990s. “Fluency,” wrote Stat’s Sharon Begley, a veteran science journalist (now deceased) who authored several books about brain science,

reflects the performance of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher-order cognitive functions such as working memory, judgment, understanding, and planning, as well as the temporal lobe, which searches for and retrieves the right words from memory. Neurologists therefore use tests of verbal fluency, and especially how it has changed over time, to assess cognitive status.

Did somebody say judgement and understanding? Eight years have passed and Trump’s prefrontal cortex has given us the January 6 insurrection, renunciation of the Constitution, wholesale impoundment of appropriated funds, the worst Cabinet in United States history … and crippling tariffs that are virtually guaranteed to start a ruinous trade war. At one of his last campaign rallies Trump spent 39 minutes just swaying to music.

In my latest New Republic piece, I argue that journalists writing about Trump’s trade strategy suffer from the Coherence Fallacy, a theological term that I apply to political analysis. Trump keeps saying he wants to replace the income tax with tariff revenue, and the press keeps downplaying that because it’s so very clearly stupid (not to mention impossible). But that’s what Trump believes. He put it in his inauguration speech, for Christ’s sake!

Tom is probably right that at this point the only analysis of Trump’s economic policy worth listening to is that of a gerontologist, of which I am not one. But I try to do my best in this latest piece. You can read it here.