Don Trump’s inability to communicate in English is fast shredding his presidency. For well over a year, Publius has shown that Don’s learning disabilities reveal the splintered intellect of a struggling 10-year old. Don can frame nothing coherently. If Don was a kid in school, he would have special assistance in all his classes. He needs this now more than ever. To assist Don, Publius offers the Trump Management Protocol (TruMP).
Don should not be allowed to make any decisions or to say anything in public without TruMP supervision.
To understand the price we all pay for leaving Don without TruMP, just look at his May 9th letter dismissing FBI Director James Comey.
Start with this sentence:
“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under (Kremlingate) investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”
Like his famous twelve-mistake sentence in his August 15th missive on security (see Publius on Dumb Don), here Don combines two clauses that are not relatable in English and so cannot fit in the same paragraph.
In Don’s syntax-free Trumplish, which, due to his intellectual limitations, is the only language he speaks, this may be OK. But, because he is the only person in the world who speaks Trumplish, translating his Trumplish letter of dismissal into English is a monster problem.
Don doesn’t speak English so he can’t do it. Because Trumplish has no syntax, it incorporates multiple unknowable outcomes in each clause and phrase, no one else can translate it either. Time for TruMP.
This Trumplish-to-English incongruence may end up bringing down Don’s presidency. Only TruMP can save Trump.
To show why his staff—and everyone in the world who is even slightly affected by what Don says and does—needs TruMP, let’s take apart Don’s Trumplish sentence firing Comey and try to rebuild it in English.
In our language, Don’s first clause—“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under (Kremlingate) investigation,”—is dependent. It requires a principle clause to make sense.
For example, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under (Kremlingate) investigation, you are lying. You're fired.”
Or, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under (Kremlingate) investigation, I am under investigation. You are incompetent. You're fired.”
In both cases, Trump reconfirms once again his 6:30 am tweet on March 4, asserting that he is a Kremlingate suspect. Either way, Comey gets fired because Don admits his culpability.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Imagine Don's staff going crazy trying to work around no more than this one dependent clause! And how crazy he's going to be because, like Publius, they can't. TruMP to the resuce!!
Let’s now turn Don’s principle clause into English to see if we can get any better results.
In English, Don would take his principle clause, “I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau” and precede it with a dependent clause that logically flows into “nevertheless.”
For example, “Even though I told a Grand Rapids, Michigan audience on October 31, 2016 that what you did with Hilary Clinton’s emails ‘took guts’, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”
In other words, I was wrong. What you did was a travesty and you should never have done it. My presidency is illegitimate.
Huh?
Trump’s staff can experiment with any dependent clause that works with “nevertheless” and, like the rest of us, it will get something just about as sensible. TruMP needed, bigly!
One way or another, whatever you do to fix Trump’s principle and dependent clauses so that they work in English, the two cannot fit together. Moreover, the core logic of each clause is so different that you must ask, what are they doing in the same letter, let alone the same sentence? Only an idiot would consider combining them the way Don Trump did.
No surprise then that when, lacking TruMP, Trump's media people tried to reframe his decision to fire Comey in English for public consumption, Trump went ballistic.
He tweeted “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future "press briefings" and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???” Don is also thinking of cancelling daily press briefings and holding them in Trumplish every two weeks himself.
But, because Trumplish has no syntax, Trumplish cannot be translated into English or any other language. (See Publius on Trumplish and Quantum Wierdness.) There is no way Don can hand out written responses to the press because, as we have seen over and over, these responses would make no sense no matter how you tried to translate them into English. No one alive can translate Trumplish into English. And, because Don cannot read, write, or speak English himself, he cannot give press briefings in English.
How can a president who is unilingual in a syntax-free language that no one else speaks and which cannot, for its lack of syntax, be translated, communicate with anybody? In any language?
Don keeps demanding that his staff get "on the same page" with him. Which page is that? How long will Don be on it? How many other pages is he on?
Feel the need for TruMP yet?
Publius' Trump Management Protocol descends from his simple eighth grade grammatical review of Trump’s words. Anyone in the world affected by Don Trump in any way, big or small, must use TruMP to manage everything Trump does or says.
What continues to astonish is that, using simple grammar, Publius alone figured out TruMP. Anyone who passed Eighth Grade English must have understood Trump’s intellectual inadequacies. But no one else even tried to decode Trump into TruMP. Not the media. Not the Democrats. Or the GOP heavy hitters.
TruMP starts with some simple assumptions based on Trump's grammatical incontinence:
Do NOT depend on Don to be rational. He does not have the level of intellect that we use to form ideas or coherent plans.
From 1.), expect Don to see everything through a base level of emotion, rather than reason (he can’t do this), that is impossible for anyone else to understand.
Expect from 1.) and 2.) that Don’s fractured intellect will respond to all stimuli in broken, incoherent bursts of emotion that are impossible for others to anticipate, understand or manage.
Expect from 1.) through 3.) that everything Don says and does will contradict everything else he says and does, usually within the same day and often in the same sentence.
From 1.) through 4.), understand that Don does not lie. Why? He cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood. Both hold at the same time and he uses them interchangeably for no obvious reason because he has no ability to reason.
Do not expect to understand Don’s Trumplish. It is not translatable. And, because of 1.) through 5.), Don does not know how to express his fractured ideas any other way.
Expect Don to announce only fiscally incoherent policies. He cannot count (See Publius on Learning to Count With Don Trump) and has no way of knowing that his policies will not work under any circumstances.
TruMP turns these assumptions into decisions.
Never give Don classified information. To him, the boundary between classified and unclassified is whatever he makes it in any given second. Don’t try to explain this boundary because he has no way of understanding what you said. Witness his giving top secret Israeli information to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister on May 10 and claiming that he has the “absolute right” to draw and redraw boundaries on the fly.
Tell Don only what you are happy to see him turn into gibberish on syntax-free Twitter in the next couple of minutes.
Run all operations as if Don does not mean what he says and cannot say what he means.
Whatever Don tells you, plan for him to say the opposite or both at the same time. He can and will switch between the two in a femtosecond. You must manage all outcomes simultaneously.
Assume that the math in Don’s policies will never work because he cannot make it work and would not understand it on the off chance that it did work.
To survive, the members of Don’s three-party coalition of the GOP, Tea Party and Freedom Caucus must apply TruMP. As they do this, they will learn why the voters of New York County voted against Don by a staggering 9:1. Our allies must also apply TruMP. As must our adversaries if they are to take advantage of Don’s meanderings.
TruMP is the key to the new world order.
Have a nice day.
Updates
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.
August 24, 2017
Great story today by Maggie Haberman in the New York Times about how Dumb Don's new Chief of Staff, John Kelly, is trying to impose TruMP on Trump. This will prove impossible as it must. Kelly, like all of the Dumb Dude's advisors, must soon look to his own future. He will conclude from applying TruMP that James Clapper is right. Dumb Don is way too many bales short of a load to be President. When Kelly gets this, he will have to leave. Staying for any period of time as close to Don as a Chief of Staff is will ruin all Kelly's income prospects. He will have to move on. TruMP is remorseless.
March 6, 2018
Gary Cohn became the latest to flunk TruMP.
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. They all failed their TruMP.
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.
June 14, 2018
Great reporting by Terrence Dopp and Justin Sink in Bloomberg a few days ago showing Dumb Don caught in his massive mental confusion. He is now trying to backtrack his year-old Trumplish sentence firing James Comey and it is making him look dumber than ever. The problem is that Don's syntax-free Trumplish makes no sense in English no matter how you rewrite it.
The key to anticipating Trump's babble with TruMP is calculating that Don's intellectual insufficiencies really plague him. Dopp and Sink show that even a year on, he is still rying to reconcile his confused mind with the gibberish he used to fire Comey. He knows that he screwed up and it drives him nuts.
Layer Dopp and Sink's reporting onto the Dumb Dude's spectacular misfires at the G7 and with North Korea over a tiny four-day period and you see quickly the cost of not having presidential candidates pass a literacy test in order to get nominated.
July 17, 2018
The one person who passed TruMP with flying colors is Putin the Small. He has managed and manipulated Dumb Don brilliantly. The reason is that he controls the Trump Dossier and much, much more.
If Don understands one thing--remember his Billy Bush rant, all the women who came forward to support his claims and Michael Cohen's Stormy payouts--it is that his personal habits are infinitely exploitable. Putin holds all the cards, even tough the Russian economy is smaller than that of Italy and is shrinking. Don bowed to the inevitable and sold his country down the river.
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.
July 8, 2019
Page 224 of the Mueller Report confirms Publius 100%. Mueller says that Trump's letter firing Comey "can reasonably be understood as acknowledging that the FBI's Russia investigations was a factor in Comey's termination." You got a two-year head's up!!
September 19, 2019
Great story by John Wagner and Karoun Demirjian in the Washington Post today about what happens when you break Rule One of our Trump Management Protocol!!! The Dumb Dude must NEVER be allowed near information that is even slightly sensitive.
September 2, 2020
It is amazing that even after four years after Publius first 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.