Donald Trump has a whole new covfefe moment
There’s a persistent narrative leitmotif among some Trump watchers that insists, against all evidence, that Donald Trump is playing some subtle, clever game. Too subtle, in fact, for the rest of us to fathom. I don’t know where they get this. If it’s true, then how do they know it’s true if it’s “too subtle to fathom”?
I think the answer is simpler than that. I think the answer is that Donald Trump is a moron. But I also think I understand the reason for this belief that he is otherwise. It stems in part from the deep human need to take life too seriously. Many people believe that God or Nature or random chance – or whatever you happen to believe is busy writing the stage play of the human condition – simply doesn’t write comedies. We are far more ready to believe a conspiracy than we are a chain of accidents wrought by human incompetence. But we think there’s something fundamentally undignified about an idiot becoming president. That just doesn’t work for us. It’s too slapstick. Too Laurel and Hardy.
Sorry to break it to you, but I firmly believe that to be the case. So when Donald Trump said of the Mueller Report on Tuesday, “I hope they… take a look at the oranges, the oranges of the investigation,” it wasn’t code intended for Putin, it wasn’t early onset dementia, he said what he said because Donald Trump is stupid. He momentarily forgot the word was “origins” and substituted “oranges” because he possesses a low wattage light bulb for a brain – and he always has.
The claim that Donald Trump used to be able to put whole complicated sentences together when he was younger as “proof” that he hasn’t always been an idiot is laughable. Who can’t do that? Show me a janitor or a gas pumper or a CEO of a blue chip corporation who can’t do that. That’s no qualifier for Mensa. That’s just proof of how laughably low our standards have become for the President of the United States, that we are willing to ascribe to him so much wisdom on so little evidence.
Like the artless buffoon he is, Donald Trump will try to convert this latest gaffe into our problem, not his. He will probably insist we simply misheard him. With “covfefe” he had to be a bit more sly, but only a bit, by insisting it was a new word he’d invented. Whatever Trump says about his latest verbal mal mot, he will never simply admit he misspoke. He’s simply not smart enough to realize that is the very best thing he could do.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.