The list of those who have failed their TruMP exams is, as Publius predicted, ‘uge and global. Publius’ Trump Management Protocol (TruMP) was, remember, derived from a simple Eighth Grade examination of the English in Don Trump’s campaign speeches.
Famously, one sentence in an August 15, 2016 policy speech had twelve mistakes. Try doing that and you will see in a second or two how shattered Don’s intellect must be. Better, try to correct Don's twelve errors and you will get an extraordinary range of sentences that have nothing to do with each other. With Publius' easy test, Don's endless confusion -- and ours -- is explicable.
You will conclude quickly that Don’s language development stopped at about the age of eleven. Moreover, his amazingly scrambled grammar suggests that he stopped learning entirely at that age. His intellect could not sustain any knowledge more complex than an eleven-year-old can absorb in any subject at any time during the rest of his life.
It does not take much to imagine the hard conversation Don’s teachers must have had with his parents. There was no special needs schooling in those days. Don’s parents must have been horrified.
Intellectual insufficiency on this scale is a monster liability for anyone. For the President of the United States it is a global disaster.
Publius designed TruMP last May as a guide to those who must manage their relations with Don Trump and with the United States. Publius' TruMP rules are:
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.
You can see how difficult passing a TruMP exam would be. You can pick anything out of the news from North Korea to the wildly gyrating status of Trump’s staff or the flailing leadership of the GOP-led three party coalition in Congress and track how they are doing against TruMP. The results are scary. All the more scary because TruMP is based on Don’s grammar, making it systematic and easy to test against.
Let’s start with North Korea with whom we are well into a Phoney War like the one between September 1, 1939, when WWII started, and May 10, 1940 when major hostilities began. Remember that, as Publius explained in Trumplish and Quantum Wierdness last March, Don's syntax-free language cannot be translated into Korean.
In a recent article by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, Pak Song Il, one of North Korea’s main interfaces with Americans, showed that because of the Trumplish-Korean translation problem, Kim Jong Un was unable to pass his TruMP exam. Pak said of Don:
“When he speaks, I have to figure out what he means, and what his next move will be. This is very difficult … He might be irrational—or too smart. We don’t know … If he’s not driving toward a point, then what is he doing? That is our big question.”
Hanging in the balance of Pak’s TruMP question? All of us.
There is not much to say of Trump’s staff that hasn't been all over the media since before Trump's inauguration. It is not clear to anyone inside or outside the White House who is coming or going or why. And, based on TruMP, Don doesn’t know either.
The Congressional leadership? Their war is multi-fronted. As Publius showed at length in February 2016 in Our Constitutional Crisis, the GOP split into two in September, 2004. Since then, the GOP leaders in both Houses have known that Job One is coalition management. With the birth of the Freedom Caucus in 2014 and the opening of a third front, the GOP leaders in Congress must manage a three-party coalition in two Houses that have unlike election cycles, agendas and interests. This they have proven quite unable to do.
Indeed, not once in all the years since the Tea Party hijacked GOP ballot lines has a word been mentioned about a common coalition platform, so none has been offered to the electorate. The Obamacare repeal fiasco is the direct result. Tax reform is up next.
On a fourth front, coalition leaders must use TruMP to work with Don. Like everyone else worldwide, they are failing. Their inability to satisfy TruMP drives Don nuts.
But, how is Don doing at his TruMP test?
Had Don Trump’s intellect not failed him sixty years ago, he would have approached his messy three-party coalition logically and worked early and hard to build his brand in the country.
From Day One, he would have known that the key to brand management was getting to the number 218 in the House. This meant brokering a GOP-led coalition platform that could hold or, failing that, cutting a deal with the Democrats. Instead, he made a mess of coalition management.
When, after many months, he finally figured out how to count to 218 and started working with the Democrats, he made them look like the deal makers. Instead of building his brand he made a convincing case for his own ineptitude.
What few knew going into the 2016 election is that Don Trump understands surprisingly little about brand. Publius had the advantage of sitting Don down for a brand exam a few years ago. After Publius showed Don how to use one of the most historic sites in the American War of Independence to build the Trump brand, Don worked assiduously to do the opposite.
Another classic is the Genuflection Crisis in professional sports. The concept was clever: get others to reflect deeply on what the country "stands" for by genuflecting during the national anthem to show special respect for the nation's core values. Anyone who objects to this gesture objects to the nation. Very sly. Don fell for it. Instead of loudly calling out levate, he rabidly denounced flectamus genua as a sign of disrespect. Ouch!!
In other words, like everyone else, Don Trump failed TruMP.
Updates
October 8, 2017
Rex Tillerson has become the next big name to fail Publius' TruMP exam. He had no choice but to call Dumb Don what he is, a "fucking moron." This will cost him his job. And in doing so, preserve what little that is left of his reputation.
Not everyone has failed Publius' TruMP exam. GOP Senator Bob Corker called it like it is and he gets a pass. He said that the White House is an adult day care center. As, of course, it is.
Today, the Genuflection Crisis deepened when Dumb Don ordered VP Mike Pence to show deep contempt for those genuflecting in support of what our nation stands for. Instead of genuflecting during the national anthem at an NFL game as he most certainly should have, he stormed out. Shows what the next president is made of.
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.
February 28, 2018
Hope Hicks, White House Communications Director, today became the latest to flunk her TruMP exam. Her resignation came a day after she tried to translate Dumb Don's Trumplish to the House Intelligence Committee in eight hours of testimony and had to admit in her testimony that doing this takes "white lies."
This drove Dumb Don nuts. As Publius showed in Trump Management Protocol (TruMP) ten months before Hicks met her end, nothing sends Dumb Don ballistic faster than someone trying to translate his syntax-free and therefore untranslatable, Trumplish into English. The closer you are to him, the faster he wants to fire you. Hope was just too close.
March 6, 2018
Gary Cohn just flunked TruMP. And he's the former COO of Goldman Sachs!
March 13, 2018
Rather than try to match Tillerson's intelligence, Dumb Don fired him. Tillerson struggled for 14 months to master Publius' Trump Management Protocol (TruMP). He took on the impossible task of translating Don's syntax-free, and therefore untranslatable, Trumplish into English so that other countries could understand the Dumb Dude. As Publius has demonstrated many times for over two years, this cannot be done. Tillerson's replacement, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, must now step up for his TruMP exam. Good luck Mike!!
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.
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!!