George F. Will op-ed: Trump has a dangerous disability

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Trump has a dangerous disability

By George F. Will Opinion writer May 3 at 7:36 PM

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President 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.
....

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.
....

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. Follow @georgewill

[Gothmog]

1. When a GOP type loses George Will, they are in trouble

[Cracklin Charlie]

2. I hate agreeing with George Will.

I wish he was wrong.

[get the red out]

3. Me to

But he has been correct on Trump for a while.

The Trump threat goes beyond party, I wish more Rs recognized that.

[Jacquette]

4. He's a take no prisoners hard core Republican

to his marrow but he hopped off the Trump Express with the quickness. He had me in stiches during the campaign with his facial expressions trying to digest some of DT's biggest howlers.

Kristol would be twisting himself into pretzels trying to find nicer words for Nazi or rapist and George would look at him...totally expressionless, oozing disdain. And nobody oozes like George.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

5. babylonsister posted this earlier. It's in GD. I didn't see it when I posted.

George Will: Trump has a dangerous disability

[LudwigPastorius]

6. The congressional GOPers seem content to...

allow the party establishment to rail against Trump's unfitness as long as they can cram a good amount of their agenda down America's throat on the side.

But, they must feel a sense of urgency to get as much done as possible before Trump is thrown out of office or before he burns the country, or the world, down to the ground.

They are, in essence, playing Russian Roulette with the country, gambling that they can advance their interests in the game and avoid the one in the chamber that will kill us all.