Publius has shown that Don Trump’s English is so poor that Don can’t sustain coherent thoughts. Don’s inability to use our language is like a rotten floor that won’t support even a little weight. Step on it and down you go.
Even if Don has a cogent moment, his English is so deficient that he cannot tell us about it. This is bad. Real bad.
You can easily do what Publius did. Take any Trump Opus and mark it up as a Ninth Grade English teacher would. Review the clause structure, prepositional phrases, paragraph transitions, and so on. Don has many speeches on many subjects. Print any one of them, mark it up and get the same results that Publius did: language skills too poor to produce or sustain logical thought. This is mind blowing.
If Don can’t get to the ninth grade, his language skills must have failed him well before he got to high school. His perfect American accent and pronunciation mask his staggering lack of basic English.
In a remarkable coincidence, a few days ago Publius discovered a short talk he gave as part of an Eighth Grade assignment in 1963. The subject was the constitutional evolution of one our close allies. It was light years beyond anything that Don has said or written since he launched his campaign for the Presidency. So, a thirteen-year old with average grades over half a century ago whups the butt of a seventy-year old man running for the Presidency of the United States in 2016. How crazy is that?
Publius' simple Ninth Grade level assessment shows why Don has generated the immense volume of gobbledygook that has kept the media fascinated for over a year. By not doing what Publius did in a couple of minutes, the media functions below Don's level, which explains a lot.
Don’s illiteracy drives his political incoherence in two dimensions:
His speeches and freeform comments are a fractured mess of illogic, contradiction and missing mass.
Over time, his mishmash of broken, inchoate utterances wanders all over the place. Speeches contradict each other and often simply ignore what the others have said.
Don's illiteracy generates two problems. One, he cannot manage what he says when he says it. Two, he has no way to control what he says over time. His birther ramblings are a case in point. Don doubtless believes that he has been 100% coherent on the birther issue. Lay out what he actually said about Obama's country of birth and Don will call you pathetic, incompetent or worse because he doesn't know any better.
Don is not lying or deliberately contradicting himself. Rather, his failed English means that he doesn’t know the difference between a set of words that he utters now or another set that he uttered a minute, a month, a year or several decades earlier.
The result is that Trump appears to be really, really dumb. Whence Dumb Don.
So, how did he do so well appropriating our tax dollars to support his real estate business? Likely, Don's obvious mental limitations mean that he can focus on one thing only and on that relentlessly. Anything else is impossible. Outside his single frame, he is lost. But he doesn’t know it. Because his accent and pronunciation are so good, we are tricked into taking his illiterate nonsense seriously.
Run Don through Publius’ Ninth Grade test and everything that he says is explainable even if it doesn’t make sense. Every time Don talks, the media would be smarter to point to his illiteracy rather than to take his blathering seriously and attempt to analyze what it means. Because it doesn't mean anything.
Don’s problem with time leads to a conclusion that he is numerically as well as linguistically illiterate. Take his budget proposals. On May 4th, he again promised to detain, process and deport a population several times the size of New York City. Doing this will triple the federal budget while shrinking GDP. On August 8, he said that he will cut taxes regardless. Then, on September 7th he said that he wants to expand military spending. Nowhere did he explain how any of this adds up. Or even his organizing first principles.
We must conclude that either Don ran the numbers just as he would to leverage the ability of others to pay his taxes and knows full well that he is lying about his intentions, or he just doesn’t know what he is saying because he can’t count. As with his illiteracy, all the evidence points to the later. Don has no idea what he is saying, let alone what it means, because he is neither literate nor numerate enough to know.
Don's antibusiness position on trade is another example of how innumerate the man is. The math behind free trade is now two centuries old. That Don never learned this stuff is too horrible to contemplate. He will cost us big time.
We see Don’s learning deficiencies combine in his misassessment of Vladimir Putin. In high school Don learned that Russia’s standing as a power ended with the 1905 revolution. He learned that Kaiser Wilhelm II understood this and, in WWI, brought what was left of Russia to its knees. Don also learned that the Soviet Union replaced Russia in 1917, becoming a super power under Stalin two decades later. But, Don also knows because he lived through the period that Stalin’s successors made a series of catastrophic errors, starting with the suppression of Hungary in 1956, that eventually dissolved the Soviet Union.
That this would happen was so obvious to Publius that, immediately following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Publius predicted the Soviet implosion. He was the first do so, outrunning the overrated CIA by more than two decades. Don, who married a Czech expatriate not long after the invasion, could easily have done the same.
The Russia that emerged from the implosion of the Soviet Union was a much-diminished power. If Don could read a map, he would have known that Vladimir Putin had a once-in-a-century opportunity, as Publius has shown, to use Russia’s excellent geographic location to power Russia back to prominence by negotiating wide ranging access to the EU and then US markets. Instead, Putin presided over Russia’s rapid diminution, making an astonishing set of miscalculations that, when the global oil market collapsed, ripped Russia from its hinges. To Don, it must be evident that Putin is easily the least effective Russian leader since Peter III several centuries ago. It will take Russia a good century more to recover from him, if it ever does.
So why is Don saying that Putin is so much better a leader than Obama who, the numbers show, is our greatest president since Roosevelt? There is only one possible conclusion: Don doesn’t know because his illiteracy extends to maps. Like Putin, he can't read maps and has no idea what they say. Just what we want in a President.
Publius has reluctantly concluded that the most likely reason that Don was unable to absorb his primary school education is that his ability to read is no better than his ability to count or to speak and write our language. Because of his multifronted inability to learn, Don comes up with an endless chain of silly assertions that he takes seriously. And that he expects us to take seriously as well.
Which raises a question: what is going on in the brains of those who say they understand Don?
To show how bad Don’s deficiencies are for America, do what Pulius does: Imagine what Xi Jinping thinks of Don’s assessment of Putin. Xi, who knows a weak neighbor when he sees one, has already had Putin beg the Center of Everything (what the characters for China mean) to bail him out of his failed single play on oil and gas. Xi knows precisely how to assess the little guy. He must think that Don is off his rocker.
Now, imagine how Xi will react to anything as President the Dumb Dude does or says about the Nine Dash Line, the greatest crisis in our history?
Think this through for about a second and you realize the risks of electing an illiterate as President.
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!! One viewer said to Publius, "English is my first language but ..."
Note to the media: always use Publius Ninth Grade test on anything Don says. It's that simple.
How good is the media at doing this? Sean Spicer, Chief Strategist and Communications Director at Republican National Committee, appeared on the PBS News Hour to defend Trump's Debate ramblings. He spoke in a series of non sequiturs that were impossible to follow. He couldn't even get his "that" and "who" right!! The audience had no way of knowing where he was coming from, let alone where he was going. And the anchor, Judy Woodruff, did nothing.
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 13-year-old boy stuck in the body of a 70-year old male. He never got past the eighth 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. He then said that all the women who stepped forward to 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.
November 16, 2016
Now that Dumb Don has been elected President of the United States, the media are finally beginning to come to grips with his developmental deficiencies. In a great piece on Bloomberg today, Jessica Shankleman looks at the impact of Don's position on global warming.
She points out that in 2012, in one of his Tweet-length thoughts, Don said that global warming “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Hmmm... Let's think this through. In order to suck down ever-more of the world's manufacturing, China has some of the dirtiest production anywhere, it is polluting itself into non existence, and it's pollution-caused healthcare costs are going through the roof. So, Don says, it recognizes that this might be a problem ... for us? Huh?
Now if the Dumb Dude had said that global warming "was created by and for the U.S in order to make Chinese manufacturing uncompetitive" he might have had at least the foundation of some kind of logic. But, as we have seen time and again, Don's strong suit is not logic.
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 Trumplish sentence in Dumb Don. 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.
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 on US security 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.