George Will wrote a stunning piece on Trump wherein he appraises Trump’s inability to think and speak clearly to a disability. Finally, a major figure on the right has come out and declared that we are not dealing with a person disinclined, as Will put it, to do the right thing but unable to do it. Exactly.
Looking at Trump’s casual dismissal of the One China policy, he quotes T.S. Elliot: a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” This is what I referred to in my Magnum Opus when I asked my readers to take a major institution of our society and trace it back to find a break in transmission from our colonial past. The weakness of people like Trump in the face of historical process and precedent is stated so well by Will: “His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.” Wow. We’ve all know people like this, people who latch onto the latest thing regardless of its lack of connection to anything at hand, its relevance – it’s just so cool. In such a mind there is no capacity for judgment, there is only ME.
How do we measure these things? Will says Trump is “uniquely unfit” to take the nation into a military conflict. What about Lincoln? What about Johnson, Roosevelt, Wilson? None of them had military experience, but what they had was knowledge and the discernment to acquire more knowledge but not to let lacunae and control urges swamp decision making. The only way to measure that is to let them do it and that demands the highest level of trust. Who trusts Trump?
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