Trump’s Worst Trait Isn’t Stupidity

His narcissism and complete lack of empathy are much more damaging.

Is there anything new we’ve learned about Donald Trump as a result of this crisis?

None. Anything that might possibly go wrong with a human being has gone wrong with him. The most dangerous aspect of Donald Trump, though, is his unbelievable stupidity. It’s not the most dangerous thing in someone with no commitments, but it’s the most dangerous thing in a President. – Fran Lebowitz to The New Yorker

“Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with Trump,” I agree. But, now that he’s president, I don’t think stupidity is his most dangerous attribute.

We’ve got our share of buffoonish presidents. Ronald Reagan was a complete moron. George W. Bush was, too. They were bad — not as bad as Trump, but still bad — but not because they were dumb.

The Iraq War, for example, was not the product of Bush’s administration’s negligence. It was the work of intelligent zealots like Dick Cheney, who is a despicable human being but not dumb. During the Reagan presidency, zealousness on the part of Reagan and his allies resulted in substantial tax cuts for the wealthy, which fueled the last four decades of that inequality.

Trump is enslaved by zealots, but not because he’s stupid; rather, he’s a tyrant. He wasn’t really a Republican or a right-winger, but he realized in the last decade or so that the GOP is the faction that bullies the less fortunate on behalf of the fortunate. That is everything Trump adores. Non-whites, blacks, homosexuals, lesbians, feminists, Democrats, educated voters, and city dwellers are all demonized by the Republican Party. What’s genuinely heinous about Trump is that he revels in it, spending every day devising fresh and more heinous ways to hasten the process of making heartland white Americans despise someone else who isn’t like them.

Trump also believes that a president’s job is to be a bully. He needs to be adored. He wants to be re-elected. And he’s so incapable of pretending that becoming president entails a greater ideal of duty that, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, his main interests are attacking a series of scapegoats and exploiting required care and safety equipment as perks given to lawmakers who kiss his butt but refused to all who don’t.

This isn’t something Trump does because he’s a moron. Trump does this because he’s a deranged jerk who lacks empathy. That is his most egregious trait.

Oh, and he’s also a complete moron.