22.4 - Donald TheRump is incompetent

Donald TheRump is incompetent

Donald TheRump

You know about TheRump's meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak where he went off-script and in the course of bragging about his "great intel" blabbed some highly classified intelligence about ISIS that had come from Israel and was so highly classified it had not been shared even with US allies.

But it was not that revelation itself but some that arose out of it that I found most revealing.

For one, the National Security Council prepares multi-page briefings for Trump for talks with foreign leaders, but he insists those be boiled down to a single page of bullet points - and he often ignores those.

Then there's the fact that some White House officials are saying that TheRump can't hurt US security because he is such a "hasty and indifferent reader of printed briefing materials" that he simply doesn't know enough to be able to reveal any specific sources or methods that would be harmful to the US or its allies.

What's more, some of his advisers and staff are afraid to leave him alone in meetings with foreign leaders because they're worried he'll say something untoward or insulting.

Now, Donald TheRump is not stupid. For all the jokes we make, we know that he is not a genuinely stupid man. He is intellectually lazy, yes, but he is also one of all-time great self-promoters: For one thing, he self-promoted himself right into the White House. Last spring, I said that you could know everything you needed to know about him if you just keep in mind he is a real-estate salesman and I wondered if he wanted to be president or just wanted to see if he could become president, to see if he could make the greatest pitch of all. So no, he is not stupid.

But what recent events have made clear is that as president, he is not just lazy - he is simply incompetent. This has nothing to do with policies or practices or the internal politics of the White House. He is just flat-out incompetent.