By George Will
Wednesday, May 03, 2017
It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly
about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere
disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual
sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to
stratospheric self-confidence.
In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump
said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing
job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically
challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler
about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal
fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.
Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson
was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death.
Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William
Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible
conflict,” Trump says:
People don’t realize, you know, the
Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why
was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?
Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking
questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these “people” who
don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him
uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute “lot of,” or at least “some,”
people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint
session of Congress: “A lot of people have said that, some people said it was
the single best speech ever made in that chamber.” Which demotes Winston
Churchill, among many others.
What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University
of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his
eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s
history. As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know
this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that.
Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know
something.
The United States is rightly worried that a strange and
callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea should
reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as
sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern
terrorism: “I would bomb the s*** out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d
blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing
left.”
As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad
is. Asked about it, he said: “We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely
careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.” Invited
to elaborate, he said: “I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power,
the devastation is very important to me.” Someone Trump deemed fit to be a
spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her
employer’s word salad: “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if
you’re afraid to use it?” To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same
program replied with amazed asperity: “The point of the nuclear triad is to be
afraid to use the damn thing.”
As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and
importance of the “one China” policy. About such things he can be, if he is
willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He
lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence.” 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.
Americans have placed vast military power at the
discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to
restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it
is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating
to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose
combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the
nation into a military conflict.
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