Dumb Don's Dummies
- fmcinerney
- Jul 27, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 14, 2020
John Bolton’s tell-all book about his time working with Dumb Don raises a big question. To volunteer to have anything to do with Don, as Bolton did, you have to be immensely dumb yourself.
Publius started using Don’s printed communications to show Don’s massive intellectual incontinence in Making Money From the Undocumented in January, 2016. Everyone who has stepped forward since then to work with someone as dumb as Don must suffer from a deep character flaw. There is no way around it.
Take Bolton.
Bolton joined Dumb Don’s circus in April, 2018 as National Security Advisor. This was over two years after Publius’ first analysis. Critically for Bolton, he joined Trump twenty months after Dumb Don’s wholly illiterate August 15, 2016 policy paper on national security. To become NAS, Bolton must have read the same words that Publius read four years ago. As Publius did in Dumb Don, Bolton must have been able to assess Dumb Don’s massive mental insufficiency immediately. It appears, however, that he could not: he has insufficiencies of his own which he has yet to confront.
Indeed, over the next year, Publius ran three more assessments of Dumb Don's mental incapacity using, as always, the Dumb Dude’s own printed words.
Then, in May, 2017, a full year before Bolton became one of Dumb Don's Dummies, Publius used his findings to create the Trump Management Protocol (TruMP), showing what someone aspiring, like Bolton, to advise Dumb Don would have to do. When Bolton came in, he had a clear set of guidelines on how to work with Trump. Indeed, TruMP showed that working with Trump is impossible. No one with even a small amount of intelligence would have been even slightly interested in the NAS job Bolton took.
It gets worse for Bolton. In TruMP Failures, half a year before Bolton joined the Dummies team, Publius published a list of those who had failed their TruMP.
Worse still, four months before Bolton joined the circus, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury confirmed all of Publius findings.
By the time Bolton joined, their TruMP failures had forced thirty-nine top Administration staffers to quit or be forced out, including Bolton’s predecessor, H.R. McMaster.
Given this, why would anyone consider working for Dumb Don? The mental deficiency needed to avoid the obvious and, for years, well-understood would have to be substantial.
And that is Bolton’s problem: Don is dumb, for sure, but, to ignore all this, Bolton must be way, way dumber still. And the other Dummies at least as dumb.
What about all those folks still working for Dumb Don? We have seen from Peter Navarro’s published op eds, in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, that he has seriously diminished abilities.
The first sentence in Navarro’s April 10, 2018 op ed in the New York Times, America’s Military-Industrial Base is at Risk, shows he does not understand that competitive advantage in modern economies is based on where you are on the Information Cost-Velocity Curve. No surprise, the rest of the piece is a mountain of illogic based on thinking that predates Alan Turing and his computer.
There can be no doubt that the people who chose to work for Dumb Don are all deeply flawed. They continue to work for him even through months of his corona virus gibberish while we close in on a third of our WWII casualties—in less than half a year. Canada, which spends less than half of what we spend per capita on healthcare, has a tiny fraction or our casualty rate. Dumb Don's Dummies didn't notice and, like Don, can't count. These simple data are way beyond them.
Dumb Don and his Dummies have exacted an enormous toll on Americans. This toll will keep rising because the deep, collective character flaws in this Administration are placing an Iron Curtain between our government and simple common sense.
Follow Up
September 15, 2020
To see just how weird Don's Dummies can be, check out this story about Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, in the New York Times. The dude is flipped and so fits perfectly in Dumb Don's administration. His mental incoherence is amazing. Even weirder, Caputo is a Putinista.
Follow Up
December 14, 2020
The latest of Don's Dummies to depart is Attorney General William Barr today.
It took John Bolton six years to catch up to Publius. On March 26, 2022, he told the The Palm Beach Post of Dumb Don's ability to negotiate peace in The Ukraine, "He's not capable of it. This would require thinking through a policy and considering the pluses and minuses, the risks and costs involved. That's just not what he does." No kidding!