Damming the Donald

Some time ago, and prior to last year’s US election, a friend of mine asked me if I could ever say anything complimentary about Donald Trump. My answer was immediately ‘no’, although that pained me a little because I generally pride myself on being able to find some positive or redeeming characteristic in most people. I mean, even Hitler loved animals, right?

I would find it very difficult if not impossible to say anything complimentary about Trump for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that he ruins everything he touches, like some kind of bizarre reverse Midas touch. I have made no secret of the fact that I don’t like the man. I don’t like his politics, I don’t like his approach and I don’t like his style. In fact, I don’t think he has any style. He may have more money than most of us, but he has no class or taste. Everything he does is crass and gaudy. He also seemingly has no compassion, no moral compass, no shame, no empathy, or any sense of humour – a fact that we Brits find especially jarring. On top of that, he apparently has no interest in literature, economics, history, politics, public service, or helping anyone beyond his family, friends and social clique. He is a thin-skinned narcissist who conducts himself in a manner akin to a school playground bully, and quite visibly lacks the self-awareness or emotional intelligence to comprehend that most of the rest of the world sees him as a complete waste of genetic material. The most useful thing Donald’s father Fred could and should have done in October 1945 was withdraw from his wife and climax over the bedsheet.

If there is one thing I find intriguing about Trump, although it’s probably equal parts intriguing and horrifying, it’s the fact that he’s incredibly unpredictable. You can’t call it a virtue, but it’s hard to ignore. I can imagine it must be very hard for people to prepare for a meeting with a man when you have no idea what he is going to say or do next. I’m not even sure he knows himself. It must be quite off-putting to walk into a discussion knowing you’re just not going to get the kind of consistent and predictable behaviour you would expect from a normal person. As I have said elsewhere, it’s clear that the regular rules of engagement simply don’t apply with Trump; he wants to do things his own way and has little time for established norms and practices. In fact, he seems to revel in firebombing them at every opportunity. This does make him a remarkably disruptive influence, but I say that more as an observation rather than any kind of plaudit. It’s like those YouTube compilation videos of Russian dashcam car crashes – you know it’s awful, but you just can’t stop watching.

It is hard to understand where Trump’s unpredictability comes from. Some have speculated it might be part of a wider, slow cognitive decline caused by neurosyphilis, whereas others have pointed to Dementia or Alzheimer’s as a more likely cause given his father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1991. Trump was very quick to criticise Joe Biden’s cognitive state during the 2024 election campaign, but shied away (uncharacteristically) from suggesting that the then-President might have the same disease that affected his own father. Trump has often questioned the mental fitness and capacity of anyone who challenges or criticises him, and has boasted of his own mental acuity and sharpness without ever publishing any test results or medical reports. In the absence of these, all we can say for sure is that the President changes his mind more often than most of us change our underwear, and that cannot be a good thing. These days he barely seems capable of making it to the end of a sentence without some new thought popping into his mind and sending him off on another rambling and incoherent tangent. Linguists who have studied his speaking patterns have noted his preference for a very clipped style using short words with few syllables. He clearly doesn’t have a very sophisticated vocabulary and often talks about subjects in binary, absolute terms (using words like ‘always’ and ‘never’). His speeches are full of non-sequiturs, digressions and rambles, and he often seems to trail off towards the end of sentences, leaving his audience to fill in the blanks. Transcribing his speeches must be an impossibility. Some linguists have suggested that this disorganised and fragmented style indicates someone with a short attention span and a lack of intellectual discipline and analytical ability. It seems like a fair hypothesis – all those bursts of noun-phrases, sudden departures from the theme, self-interruptions, memory flashes and obscure side remarks certainly feel like the disordered language of someone with a concentration problem. Exactly what you want from the leader of the world’s single largest nuclear superpower.

Is he mad? Is he deluded? Is he a sick old man who just needs to step aside and leave politics to the more capable professionals? It’s hard to say, but the more important point is that we are all looking at Trump and trying to understand and judge him through a lens of normality that simply doesn’t seem to apply. This fact, coupled with the apparent evaporation of dissent to him from within the Republican party and the current impotence of the Democrats makes for a very dangerous time indeed.