Donald Trump is not a curious person. He barely reads, if at all, and he scolds officials who come to brief him with anything more than the most succinct reading material possible, as noted previously. “It’s worse than you can imagine,” former economic advisor Gary Cohn reportedly wrote in an email. “Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
During the campaign, candidate Trump variably touted and dismissed his own reading habits. He proclaimed himself a great advocate of the Bible, remarking in February 2016 that “Nobody reads the Bible more than me.” He was unable to point to a single Bible verse that he found inspiring, almost certainly because he’s never actually read it. I’ve never heard him mention scripture of his own accord, nor has anyone else I know. When pressed further about his reading habits, Trump once said he had no time to dive into books. “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot.” At one point, news host Megyn Kelly asked him about the last book he read, to which Trump responded, “I read passages. I read areas, chapters. I don’t have the time. When was the last time I watched a baseball game?”
The lack-of-time argument is dubious. Looking each morning at the president’s daily schedule, any of us could tell you he carves out more than enough time to do what he wants. The demands of the job rarely keep him away from the golf course. Both of President Trump’s predecessors, Bush and Obama, were voracious readers. Trump himself frequently stays up late in the residence, and he often doesn’t start the day in the Oval Office until 10 or 11 a.m. Rather than consume books, he spends his time bingeing on cable news, tweeting, and making phone calls. In his own words, Trump says he doesn’t need to read to make informed decisions because he acts “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already have], plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”
The sheer level of intellectual laziness is astounding. I found myself bewildered how anyone could have run a private company on the empty mental tank President Trump relies upon every day to run the government. On television, a CEO-turned-showman can sit around a desk and bark orders at subordinates and then go to commercial. In real life, a successful CEO has to absorb a lot of information, about the economic climate, about his or her competitors, about product and consumer trends. How can you manage a sprawling organization if you won’t read anything? Not very well, it turns out.
The president does claim to be highly intelligent, though. He has been touting his intellect for years and loves to boast about his great brain in private meetings at the White House. In 2013, he tweeted: “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest—and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” In 2016, when asked during the campaign whom he was consulting on foreign policy, he responded: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things… My primary consultant is myself, and I have, you know, I have a good instinct for this stuff.” On the contrary, outside advisors who helped him with debate prep were mortified by his lack of understanding on the subject. In 2018, he took to Twitter again to burnish his cognitive credentials: “My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he posted in January 2018. “I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star… to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius… and a very stable genius at that!” Intelligence is one of those qualities that, if you insist you have it, you probably don’t. Nonetheless, Trump is known to interrupt briefings with assertions along the lines of, “Yeah, I get it. I’m pretty smart, okay?”
The president frequently claims to be an expert on issues about which, in reality, advisors will have found out he knows very little. Here is a sample from a much larger list put together by astute observers:
On campaign finance: “I think nobody knows more about campaign finance than I do, because I’m the biggest contributor.”
On the courts: “I know more about courts than any human being on Earth.”
On trade: “Nobody knows more about trade than me.”
On taxes: “Nobody knows more about taxes than I do.”
On ISIS: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.”
On the US government: “Nobody knows the system better than I do.”
On technology: “Technology—nobody knows more about technology than me.”
On drone technology, specifically: “I know more about drones than anybody. I know about every form of safety that you can have.”
On the contrary, I’ve seen the president fall flat on his face when trying to speak intelligently about most of these topics. You can see why behind closed doors his own top officials deride him as an “idiot” and a “moron” with the understanding of a “fifth or sixth grader.” Folks have been forced to publicly deny those specific quotes, usually with non-denial denials. These are the tamest descriptions used internally to express exasperation with the commander in chief. People normally tack a string of expletives onto the front and back ends of their assessments.
You don’t always get this level of candor. Even in private, officials are afraid to express their opinions about the president because they don’t know whom to trust. In one instance when we were all on the road, a high-level aide waited until we were thirty thousand feet in the air, everyone around us was asleep, and we were out of the country to share his own daily anecdotes of how alarmingly uninformed the president was. The man was a wreck, he lamented, and had a juvenile view of complex subjects. Trump was all over the map when he spoke and was unfocused when it came time to sit down and talk about serious issues. I assured him that was the general experience.
Trump defenders will be tempted to write these off as the musings of Never-Trumpers, but that is not the case. We are talking about people who came into office committed to serving the commander and carrying out the mission. I am not qualified to diagnose the president’s mental acuity. All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.
The president also can’t remember what he’s said or been told. Americans are used to him denying words that have come out of his mouth. Sometimes this is to avoid responsibility. Often, it appears Trump genuinely doesn’t remember important facts. The forgetfulness was on display after the president was briefed on a major Category 5 hurricane approaching Florida. “I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of a Category 5… I don’t know that I’ve ever even heard the term,” he told reporters. White House aides were baffled. He’d been briefed on four other Category 5 hurricanes during his time in office. Was he forgetting these briefings? Or more problematic, was he not paying attention at all? These are events that affect millions of Americans, yet they don’t seem to stick in his brain.
You don’t need to be a presidential appointee to witness his irregular mental state. Just watch any Trump rally. While giving a speech on energy production one day, the president made an errant comment about Japan, complaining that they “send us thousands and thousands—millions!—of cars, [and] we send them wheat. Wheat! That’s not a good deal. And they don’t even want our wheat. They do it to make us feel that we’re okay, you know, they do it to make us feel good.” Ignoring the fact that trade with Japan was irrelevant to the speech, the comment didn’t make sense. Wheat is not a top US export to Japan. It’s not even one of our main agricultural exports to the Asian nation, as appointees in our Commerce Department later pointed out. Also, his characterization isn’t a coherent way of thinking about how countries purchase goods. Nations don’t buy our products on behalf of their people, and they don’t do it to make us “feel good.” Trump makes such statements all the time, leading to our next point.