The image of President Donald Trump’s mind as an empty wasteland—a void touched only by sudden storms and mirages—has a strong hold on members of both the Democratic and Republican parties. For Democrats, scorn for Trump’s intellectual abilities is of a piece with their rage at almost every aspect of his Presidency—indeed, at the very fact of his Presidency. And it’s as good an explanation as any for his Administration’s often incomprehensible actions. Sometimes his tweets read as the work of a malcontent tween, with boasts that are recklessly large. Other times, they contain assertions of Presidential power that seem to suggest that the plain language of the Constitution is inscrutable to him, or just uninteresting. Then there was his tweet this past weekend, in response to Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury,” about his status as “a very stable genius,” which was almost self-nullifying: would a stable genius, or even a slightly wobbly, reasonably intelligent person, reveal his insecurities in such a manner?
A certain sort of Republican, meanwhile, sees some comfort in the idea that Trump, having won the election for the Party, is ready to have his vague allegiance to conservatism fleshed out and explained by someone who really is smart about such things—whether a pragmatic politician or an orthodox ideologue. The delusions and the self-deceptions of both types of Republican are on flamboyant display in Wolff’s book. This is particularly true of Steve Bannon, whose triumphalist braying to Wolff has now become a grovelling wail; Bannon spent the weekend begging not only Trump but also his erstwhile financial backers to forgive him. But Bannon was not the only one who thought that he was engaged in a tug-of-war for an empty vessel that would give its possessor fabulous powers. A number of Republican leaders have imagined that Trump’s vapidity could be their ladder. His volatility was also a fine alibi for their own ambitions and their complicity in his Administration. Wolff opens his book with a scene that illustrates this tendency: at a dinner party after the election, a worried Roger Ailes, of Fox News, who, according to Wolff, “was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone,” talks to Bannon about the plan to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. “Does Donald know?” Ailes asks. Bannon replies with a smile and “almost with a wink.”
Playing the role of a would-be Svengali demands a certain subtlety of Republicans, at least in their public pronouncements, but it would seem that a number of them make up for it with semi-private expressions of smugness. Many appear in Wolff’s book, which is weak on analysis and policy reporting but is a revelatory well of transcribed backbiting and bitter braggadocio. (Wolff says that his sources include both his own interviews and “the almost samizdat sharing, or gobsmacked retelling, of otherwise private and deep-background conversations,” which is a fancy way of describing gossip.) He also says that he doesn’t himself believe that some of the stories he’s heard are true; others are already common currency in reporting on Trump. The White House has described the book as fiction, and Bannon, who spoke on the record, as almost deranged; Trump said that Bannon had “lost his mind.” But, if so, he is a delusional self-promoter whom Trump himself elevated to a position of power in the West Wing. Wolff may, at times, mistake the terms of the various fights, but their pettiness and their ugliness is unmissable.
In the White House that Wolff portrays, finding crude ways to call the President stupid is a form of therapy. It had already been widely reported that Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, called the President “a fucking moron.” Wolff adds Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, calling Trump an “idiot”; Gary Cohn, the President’s chief economics adviser, calling him “dumb as shit”; and H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, throwing in “dope.” For good measure, Bannon says that Ivanka Trump is “dumb as a brick.”
But the insults are reciprocated. The book also notes that Trump called Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive, “a complete idiot,” and, while mocking Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “drew a corrosive portrait of physical and mental weakness.” When Bannon, rolling his eyes, starts calling the President’s family and his inner circle “the geniuses,” he is, Wolff writes, engaged in copy-cat name-calling: “geniuses” is Trump’s own sarcastic term for the political professionals who get everything wrong. (“Genius” is a word that pops up a lot in Wolff’s book, almost always as a slur.) Putting up with Trump’s insults seems to be part of working for him. It also seems to be infectious. If the White House has descended into a scene not unlike a schoolyard, where everyone is shouting that everyone else is stupid, are we hearing a sober assessment of the President’s intelligence, or just observing a spectacle of dysfunction? At a certain point, does the distinction even matter? It’s not a wise way to run a White House.
Trump, in another tweet this weekend, attesting to the power of his mind, wrote that “the Fake News Mainstream Media” was “taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.” He added, “throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” One odd aspect of the discussion of Trump’s mind in the past few days is the way that those two qualities—intelligence and stability—have been yoked together. This has not always been the case in the political “playbook.” (Republican critics of Franklin D. Roosevelt, including, as I noted recently, Herbert Hoover and members of his Cabinet, thought that F.D.R. was dim but pleasantly even-keeled.) In Reagan’s case, Democrats may have been too invested in the idea that he was a know-nothing movie star, missing the way his years as a conservative speaker and governor had formed him. Yet it has become increasingly clear that there may have been real questions concerning Reagan’s mental fitness in office, related not to his intelligence or to his ideological vision (which did have real depth) but to the early effects of Alzheimer’s disease.
Is Trump a genius? That’s not the question that matters, in part because the answers it yields are, again, often distractions. Trying to win an argument by calling the person on the other side stupid does not tend to be productive. It also opens one up to the trap of thinking that a person who is not “smart” can be manipulated or persuaded—perhaps by some economic-growth charts that Paul Ryan comes up with. Trump lacks an accurate, full picture of the world and how it works—of history, of the philosophies that form and drive nations. But he does seem to have a picture, distorted though it may be, that he holds onto tightly, no matter what he is told; he has an ideology. He was calling for a ban on Muslims months before the man he now calls Sloppy Steve joined his campaign. Bannon left the White House last year; Trump doesn’t seem to have undergone any transformation. (He also, despite Bannon’s absence, announced that the embassy was moving to Jerusalem.) That he has, along the way, discarded various positions is more of a sign of his willfulness and his instinctive opportunism than of his malleability.
But is Trump stable? There is no question that he is unpredictable and undisciplined; he has bragged about that. He is also callous and bigoted, qualities that can lead a person to act indifferently where the well-being of those deemed less worthy is concerned. (Trump’s talk of his intelligence has a eugenic streak to it, as evidenced in his tales of his Uncle John, who was a professor at M.I.T.) But insanity is distinct from either idiocy or indifference. If the people around Trump are covering for him in that respect, they should put what they know before the public; if they don’t, they might reflect on whether they have become captive to the idea that they themselves are essential, stable geniuses—and on how much of the nation’s safety they are wagering on that notion. Wolff recounts discussions in the White House about whether the situation was “Twenty-fifth Amendment bad,” referring to the part of the Constitution that could, in theory, be used to remove Trump if his Cabinet, Vice-President, and also (if Trump objects to their assessment) Congress conclude he has become unable to discharge his duties. My colleague Evan Osnos has written about this amendment, which was designed for disabilities. Theoretically, if Trump appears to those around him to have truly lost his grip on reality, it could come into play. But it’s not a quick fix. Neither is impeachment, which depends on the coöperation of both the Senate and the House. Maybe, if the Democrats somehow manage to win control of both chambers later this year, that scenario would become more likely. But neither instability nor idiocy is, in itself, an impeachable offense.
In reality, the question of whether Trump has the right mind to be President must be seen for what it is: a political question. Voters are the ones asked, ultimately, to make the risk assessment. Those who oppose him, in highlighting his really dangerous volatility, might ask when his supporters will see that he is stupid and unfit—and that they, in contrast, are clever and competent—and just stop this crazy Presidency? The answer, for all practical purposes, is when someone comes up with a candidate who can beat Trump.
