Essays
Arsonist in Chief
Last week, at a Saudi-backed investment summit in Miami, the President of the United States told a room full of global financiers that he prefers to surround himself with “losers” because it makes him feel better about himself. His exact reasoning:
"I hate guys that are very, very successful and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people that like to listen to my success."
The mean girl energy here is palpable. Surrounding yourself with people you consider beneath you just so you can feel tall. That's not leadership. That's clinical insecurity cosplaying as confidence. A man so fragile that the mere proximity of competence feels like a personal attack.
This is a man who proudly does not read. Who dismisses expertise as elitism.
Who has treated intellectual curiosity as a character flaw since prep school, where by all accounts he was a resentful, unremarkable student whose daddy's money was the only thing separating him from expulsion. And he has carried that utter contempt for knowledge his entire life.
So yes, Donald Trump is, by any objective measure, a profoundly stupid man. Even an imbecile. A carnival barker whose most reliable trait is his consistent failure in business. Six bankruptcies. Notably a casino, a business built on one guiding principle, the house always wins yet inexplicably he still managed to lose. And a fraudulent university that cost him twenty-five million in settlements. And a mortgage company. Magazines. Frozen steaks. Vodka. This man could not successfully sell red meat, alcohol, or gambling to Americans.
But here's the thing. His vast stupidity is not our most dangerous problem.
Because in fourteen months, even a complete idiot could not fumble his way about inflicting this much irreparable damage on a country. Both domestically and internationally. Across every institution, every alliance, and every societal norm simultaneously. Unfortunately this much damage is not the work of incompetence alone.
At this point, I believe the 2020 election broke something in him. Not politically. Psychologically. He was unable to process his loss. A man who has structured his entire identity around "winning", as he so tediously reminds us, was told by 81 million people that he lost. And his brain simply rejected that input.
And so, what started as a petty example of a legal revenge tour against his perceived enemies (prosecutors, election officials, and anyone who certified the results) has metastasized into something much more sinister.
He is not governing, or even pretending to. He is not even grifting. I mean, sure that’s part of it, but it is no longer the prime directive, more of a bonus effect.
Clearly he is dismantling. Deliberately and methodically. With the focus of a man who has decided that if the country rejected him, then the country deserves to burn to the ground.
The economy was sabotaged through churn and burn policies and reckless tariff based trade wars billed as strongman tactics.
Americans have paid the price, literally.
Our constitutional rights were deemed to be merely suggestions that could be squashed on a whim by executive tantrum.
Americans have lost their defining freedoms.
A qualified federal workforce was gutted and replaced with loyalists (clearly the aforementioned “losers”) whose only qualification is obedience.
Americans have lost their constitutionally guaranteed representation.
A secret police force has been warehousing non-citizens in the most inhumane of conditions.
Americans have lost their families.
That same secret police has murdered citizens in cold blood with false narratives and no accountability.
Americans have lost their lives.
International alliances have been torched for entertainment.
Americans have lost their place in the world.
Illegal wars were started and war crimes proudly threatened and perpetrated.
Americans have lost any remaining claim to moral authority.
This is not policy.
This is arson.
This is not the behavior of a man who genuinely wants to lead a country. He wants to punish one.
Every institution that told him no, destroyed.
Every check on his power, dismantled.
Every truth that contradicts his fiction, suppressed.
He is settling a score on a nation, and the collateral damage is 330 million people unlucky enough to just be living in the country he's decided to rage on.
Trump the dolt could not stumble into causing this much damage. Even Trump the Russian asset could not pull this off, at least not this efficiently.
Make no mistake, he is stupid, but not so stupid that he doesn’t realize the havoc he unleashes.
He is doing all of this on purpose, out of spite.
This requires something more dangerous: a narcissist in the grip of an all-consuming grudge that he would rather raze everything to ashes than accept that he was, even once, told no.