Publius is blown away by how hard Don Trump has worked to lose the 2016 Presidential Election. Don has labored assiduously around the clock to ensure that he gets the fewest votes possible. Is Don crazy or just dumb?
To find out, Publius printed some of Don’s speeches and examined them the way Don’s Eighth Grade English teacher would have done over half a century ago. The results are astonishing. It is 100% evident the Don cannot write or speak English. If this is the case, it is likely that he cannot read our language either.
Let’s start with this lulu from his August 15th speech on security:
“Unlike Hilary Clinton, who has risked so many lives with her careless handling of sensitive information, my Administration will not telegraph exact military plans to the enemy.”
Don’s Eighth Grade English teacher would have told Don that:
Your principle and subordinate clauses have entirely different subjects and cannot, therefore, be put in the same sentence. Even in the same paragraph.
Each paragraph must have its own subject.
These must be linked by transitions that connect the paragraphs into a coherent whole.
Faulty transitions are faulty logic; it’s that simple.
“Telegraphing exact military plans” is a deliberate act to inform the enemy of your intentions, which is, by definition, treason.
“Careless handing” is, by contrast, ineptitude. No matter how bad the ineptitude nor how much of it there is, it is unintentional by definition.
“Careless handling” can be sequential—as in leaving the door unlocked every day at the same time, allowing someone to figure out when the door is unlocked.
But to “telegraph exact military plans,” this sequence must be carefully planned to ensure that the enemy can see your weakness. This is treason, not carelessness.
“Careless handling” cannot, therefore, lead to “telegraphing exact military plans.” To show a connection between them you have to, well, show a connection!!
To establish a connection between ineptitude and malice aforethought, you need a paragraph—probably several. Moreover, because of the logical distinction between “careless” and “deliberate,” this will be next to impossible to do no matter how hard you try.
Where do you make your case for treason?
If you cannot make the connection between ineptitude and treason, and are also unable to support the charge of treason, you have to scrub the entire concept from your talk.
That's an astounding twelve errors in one sentence!! Try that yourself. The Publius challenge: write a sentence with twelve mistakes.
The damage? Because this sentence is key to Don's security speech, his teacher would tell him that he has to start over with different ideas designed to reach different conclusions. No wonder Putin and Xi are delighted at the prospect of Dumb Don as a negotiating partner.
Don is supposed to be a native English speaker who has had seventy years of practice in our language. But, he wrote and then said this sentence without understanding even the eighth grade basics what he wrote and said. Seventy years of this is unarguable proof that Don’s mind functions in such a way that he has no way of knowing what he says or means. So he cannot communicate. Which is why he doesn’t.
As always, Don proceeded anyway, clearly unaware of his mental limitations. You will find hundreds of similar examples littering everything the man says and writes.
Publius’ conclusion: Don can neither write nor speak English. Can he read our language any better than he speaks it? His known dislike for reading policy papers suggests that he can’t read either and is likely intimidated by the prospect.
The result of Don’s functional illiteracy is an endless chain of gibberish that makes sense only to those as unschooled as he is. Even then, because Don’s stream of incoherence is incoherent, it can only be understood by accident even by those functioning at his diminished intellectual level.
As Publius analysis shows, Don’s logic is a function his illiteracy.
Once we start at Don's illiteracy baseline, even though just about everything Don says and does makes no logical sense whatever, it is one hundred percent explicable. Don cannot tell if anything he says makes sense. He is functionally unable to tell the difference between sense and nonsense.
Let’s start with the simple stuff: Don won’t release his tax returns. Why? To any sentient being, by not releasing his tax returns, Don is telling us that he does not want be considered for the office of President of the United States. In effect, by not releasing his tax returns, Don declined the GOP nomination. But, if he’s not running, what is he doing?
Using Publius’ analysis, the answer is easy: Don doesn’t know what he is doing and doesn’t know how to tell us even if he did.
When this nuttiness began last year, Don seemed just plain crazy: saying things that made no sense and doing things that made still less sense. The list of what he has done to chase voters away in the largest possible numbers is astonishing for its depth and breadth. Don has done everything you could think of to unload voters and plenty that you could never ever imagine.
This suggests that Don has the same weaknesses with basic arithmetic that he has with our language.
Recently, for example, Don hired Steve Bannon to manage his flailing, inchoate campaign. Bannon is the former CEO of a radical fringe web site Breitbart News and a real turn off to the broad base of voters Trump must reach. Basic arithmetic says that you would only hire Bannon if you wanted to minimize your appeal sharply and quickly. So why do it? Don’s linguistic and arithmetic illiteracy shows he doesn’t have the mental power to think this through let alone tell us why.
Then, he took on Roger Ailes as an advisor right after Ailes was fired by Fox News for indiscretions with female employees. Fox quickly settled with one of them for $20 million. Others are in the lists. These settlements will be in the news for months. Women were already fleeing Don in huge numbers for his own bon mots. So, why is Don working so hard to compound his deficit in female voters? Again, Don’s illiteracy prevents him from reasoning from first causes or telling us why. Being innumerate compounds Don's flunking grade.
Don has been even more inept with Latino and African-American voters. Why? Same thing. Don can't count or think.
Don went to Penn. Can it be that he’s just dumb and that Penn graduated him anyway hoping that he would fund an endowment? Crazy as it seems, every day this looks more and more likely. Because, as we have seen, Don should not have gotten into the ninth grade, there must have been some exogenous force moving him forward irrespective of failings that were easily evident to his teachers from an early age.
Here’s a fun one. Dumb Don told us on August 15 that, “In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test.” Publius, who has plenty of his own red flags, got nary a murmur from the INS. In one of the toughest Cold War screenings on record, the INS told Publius that they had lost his files but would gave him a green card anyway. Then citizenship. Don knows all about this because his first wife came from Canada and he was with her when her Cold War screening didn’t happen!!
To make his assertion about Cold War screening in spite of what he knew perfectly well about that screening means that something in Don is not working at all.
The evidence mounts.
Every day, Don uses his inability to speak and write English to tell as many of us as possible as often as possible through his huge media presence that he cannot wake up in the morning thinking straight. Crazy! But that’s our Don.
Every time he opens his mouth, he demands that we rise up as a nation on November 8 and say with one voice, “This one’s easy Don. You’re fired.”
Follow Up
September 28, 2016
Wow!! The Dumb Dude proved Publius right on the money in the first Presidential Debate of this cycle. Thank you Don!! You are now 100% predictable: you will always utter gibberish no matter the subject. Note to the media: always use Publius Ninth Grade test on anything Don says. It's that simple.
October 9, 2016
The Dumb Dude is the gift that keeps on giving!! He has made Publius the top political analysts in America today. You gotta love this guy!!
Don's Billy Bush rant shows definitively that Publius' ninth grade test covers everything from Don's ability to read and write to his emotional maturity. Thirty days before the US presidential election, Don insists that we understand that he is a 12-year-old boy stuck in the body of a 70-year old male. He never got past the seventh grade intellectually or emotionally. He can talk boy-to-boy but not man-to-man and never man-to-woman. And he really, really wants to be President when he grows up.
What is left of the GOP walked right into the trap Publius said was waiting for them. Ran actually. And must now pay the price Publius has set. Good luck with that.
October 29, 2016
In a 2005 interview with Billy Bush, Don Trump detailed his methods for violating women. Then, on October 14th, the Dumb Dude told a crowd in Greensboro, NC that he did not violate a woman who said that he used his self-stated methods on her because “she would not be my first choice.” If she had been his first choice, apparently he would have done what he says he does. Sure enough, a group of women quickly stepped forward to say that they were Don's first choice and confirmed everything he said. Don then claimed that all the women who support his Billy Bush interview claims are a conspiracy against him. He says now that he will sue them for agreeing with him.
You can’t make this stuff up.
More amazing still, Dumb Don’s audience cheered wildly when he gave them the news.
Publius is not a lawyer. But, he knows the sound of lawyers laughing when he hears it and has already written the script for the next Jacoby and Meyers ad.
What Publius wants to know is why would Don knowingly go to such great lengths to destroy his candidacy, his brand and with it the well-being of his children? Especially since, whether he wins the Presidency or loses, women will keep stepping forward as he is forced to pay out bigly, driving on brand-destroying legal actions for years.
If you were his children, you would want Dad to lose the election in order to keep the Trump brand implosion more manageable than if he wins. No surprise, the family has begun the process of de-Trumpification with a new hotel brand, Scion.
Publius asks, what is the thinking of a father who carpet bombs the livelihood of his children? Try to reason through why you would do this to your children and you get an instant measure of how completely disconnected Don is from the world in which he lives. What it is, in effect, that makes him so Dumb.
Add to his disconnection Don’s increasingly hysterical assertions that everything is “rigged” against him or part of some monstrous “conspiracy” and you get a darker picture of how dumb Don is.
Publius was in Japan and showed Don’s October 14th TV clip to a Japanese colleague. The colleague, for whom English is a second language, said immediately, “he doesn’t understand the logic of what he is saying.”
Precisely.
Don is so dumb that cannot say what he means. Nor can he tell you the meaning of what he says. More important for voters (and his children), he does not know that he cannot do this.
The math is pretty cruel: Don does not have a single supporter because he cannot tell even one person what he is saying or the meaning of what he says.
Why then did so many in Don’s Greensboro crowd cheer if it isn’t remotely possible for any of them to have even the slightest idea of what he says or means? Even on something as shocking as sexual assault?
There can be only two answers. Either they like Don’s ideas of violating women or they are really, really stupid. Both answers mean that they happily jumped into Hilary’s “basket of deplorables.” Every time they cheer Don, they reaffirm their basket status. This is insane.
Don seems to know that something has gone wrong with his campaign. Calling Hilary Clinton a “nasty woman” in the third debate was pretty strong stuff and evidence of his deep isolation and bigly frustration.
What we see here is someone with the intellectual and emotional development of a psychologically isolated eleven- or twelve-year old boy struggling in the body of a seventy-year old man and unable to figure out what is happening to him. This is only natural. Most children with his mental profile would act the same way.
December 2, 2016
How Dumb can the Great Dumb One be? Really, really dumb. Having won the Presidency by losing the popular vote, the Dumb Dude started on a remarkable series of calls to foreign leaders including one to Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif that beggars belief. Seems like the incoming Commander-in-Chief does not know that Pakistan is a failed state, the home of serious terror operations and a pillar of instability in both South Asia and the strategic oceans around it. And he didn't have the slightest idea what India, China and Iran would think of his ravings. Let alone Seal Team Six!
April 1, 2017
To understand the impact of the Great Dumb One's illiteracy on his presidency, check out Publius on Don's nutty assertion that he is a Kremlingate suspect (Trumplish and Quantum Weirdness, March 30, 2017). When you layer his claim that he is the subject of a long-running FBI investigation onto the one sentence wonder above from Don's August 15 speech on security, you see quickly the impact of Don's illiteracy.
Don's presidency has degenerated into a sludge of incoherent babble. He is bogged down in his sludge, unable to move. His inability to count to 218 (see Publius on Our Constitutional Crisis, February 25, 2016 and the crisis' outcome Our Four Party System, March 30, 2017) resulted in a stunning setback over Obamacare reform. How hard is counting to 218? Especially when, as you can see from Our Constitutional Crisis, that Don Trump had over ten years in which to do it.
Anyone could have administered Publius' Ninth Grade English test to Don long before the election. Why did the GOP elites not administer this simple test before handing him their banner? Why did the Democrats not do it to put Hilary into the White House? Why didn't Hilary do it herself? Why did no one, absolutely no one, in the media point this out to the voters? Worse, why did the voters not do it for themselves?
The answer is not even slightly funny: they didn't know how to do it.
August 16, 2017
Dumb Don loves making Publius look like a genius. Once again, our Hacksident has turned himself into a zero. He has just been forced to disband all his CEO Advisory Councils after more and more CEOs left because of his dumb comments on the Charlottesville VA white supremacist terror attack.
October 11, 2017
Dumb Don, who is so intellectually insufficient that he can't pass Publius' TruMP exam, has challenged his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson to an IQ Test, saying that he is sure he knows who will win. Talk about putting your foot in it! Yes, Don, we all know who will win.
May 22, 2018
The Dumb Dude's attempt to work out a trade deal with China ended up being as incoherent as his 12-mistake sentence. His staggering intellectual insufficiencies sabotaged his trade negotiations with China in a way that China can see see how to play Don's mental limitations to its benefit.
Critically, the members of Don's negotiating team fell out with each other publicly in China as if they were all separate parts of Don's illiterate sentence.
This is the cost of Don's Trumplish. No one on Don's team speaks Trumplish -- only Don does this -- so that everyone on his team has a different understanding of what Don says and follows it. And Don cannot tell any of them what he means, because he doesn't know what he means.
For China ("The Center of Everything "in Chinese ), this is money in the bank.
For us?
We just pay.
May 27, 2018
In The New York Times today, Christina Caron wrote a great story today about how a former high school teacher, Yvonne Mason, discovered syntax-free Trumplish all through a letter she reviewed from Dumb Don.
It has taken nearly two years for someone else to do what Publius did to Don's August 15, 2016 missive on security.
But people are finally getting the message: What Don's massive intellectual deficit means for his words and actions can be easily and quickly divined from his English grammar and composition.
This tool has been freely available to anyone who read Dumb Don's campaign epistles. The crazy thing is at that, until Yvonne Mason, Publius was the only one who used it. And Publius remains the only person to use it to explain time and again, consistently and with precision, all of the Dumb Dude's misfires, domestic and foreign.
September 10, 2018
It took nearly two years since Publius published Dumb Don, but the anonymous editorial page piece in the New York Times by a Trump admin insider on September 5th confirms everything you read here. The real stunner is that Publius made everyone aware of the problem well before the election, starting with Don Trump Learns to Travel and Learning to Count With Don Trump, both in February 2016 and on to Don Trump Learns Foreign Policy in May, 2016, Don Trump and the Mexican Drug Lords in July, 2016, this piece on Dumb Don, and then Illiterate Don and You in September 2016.
So why would anyone with any brains ever work with such a fool? And what were the Repos thinking when they allowed him to run for the nomination?
December 6, 2018
This is priceless. A retired teacher tries to edit Dumb Don's Trumplish!!
December 7, 2018
It took Fox News' Tucker Carlson two and a half years after he read Dumb Don's August 15, 2016 misfire quoted here to admit want he has long known. He told Dei Weltwoche that Don is incapable of learning, let alone acting. Well done Tucker! You've deliberately mislead Fox audiences for years. Now tell them what they are supposed to do about this.
May 21, 2020
Vanity Fair just published a piece about how Dumb Don's intelligence officials struggle to work with him because he has the mental acuity of a "giant toddler". Took them nearly four years to get to where we were in mid 2016. How many years will it take the media to get to where we are today?
July 16, 2020
It took nearly four long years but the media is finally catching up to Publius! E.J. Dionne's analysis of Trump's illiteracy in the Washington Post today begins to look at the massive implications of Don's illiteracy.
September 2, 2020
It is amazing that even after four years after Publius showed Dumb Don's intellectual incontinence and reliance on Trumplish, which, because it is syntax free cannot be translated into English, journalists like the Washington Post's Josh Dawsey are still marveling at Don's inability to converse coherently in English. Do these folks not do their homework? Dawsey didn't even bother to explain to readers the implications of Don's August 15, 2016 national security paper, something he absolutely had to do right at the beginning of his piece.
January 6, 2021
As Dumb Don's illiterate bumpkins swarmed all over the Capitol today in an attempt to overthrow the government, Dumb Don's Dummies suddenly figured out what was published here years ago.