Flowers for America

Ezra Klein has a really perceptive piece on the discreet charm of the Donald Trump. Gift link.

For many months we made a lot of fun of Klein on LGM, because he kept hammering away at the claim that Joe Biden was too old to get re-elected, and that the Democrats had better get real about that. Now one of the most annoying things in the world is find out that somebody you made constant fun of for making a bunch of ridiculous claims turns out to have been right all along about those claims, and that it turns out it was you who was being ridiculous. One consequence of that annoyance is to engage in some kind of knee-jerk resentment and dismissal of the person’s further arguments, because it’s embarrassing to admit to oneself that this annoying person was actually right while you were wrong about this really big thing.

That’s obviously not a healthy impulse, and it needs to be resisted, especially given that Klein’s track record in regard to this kind of analysis turns out to be really good.

His analysis here — it’s a fairly long essay by the standards of the Instagram Age — is that the key to Donald Trump’s success as a politician is that he’s a completely disinhibited personality. This disinhibition makes him authentic and charismatic to his fans. It’s also his biggest weakness, because there are some huge disadvantages to giving someone with the cognitive development and emotional impulse control of a spoiled child the most powerful and important job in the world.

Klein makes this argument in great detail. It’s one of those points that has been made in various ways by various people, because it’s obviously true, but he states it straightforwardly and with much illustrative evidence, in a way that helps clarify exactly what’s going on.

A couple of other key claims in Klein’s argument are that:

(1) Trump’s disinhibition was to a significant extent kept under control during his first administration, because he was surrounded by a lot of people who actually weren’t OK with having a spoiled toddler in the Oval Office. Klein argues — I mean it’s hardly disputable at this point — that those people are all gone, and that Trump is now surrounded by nothing but amoral and ambitious yes men who will all be doing nothing but working towards the Fuhrer (my phrase not Klein’s) during a second Trump administration. This is what Project 2025 is all about.

(2) Trump’s extremely high baseline level of disinhibition is now being exacerbated by the further disinhibiting tendencies of aging. FWIW I think Klein somewhat understates the extent to which this is going on, but in any case it very clearly is happening right before our eyes.

Trump’s accelerating return to pure unfiltered toddlerhood may in the end keep him from getting re-elected:

What is remarkable to me about that answer [Trump gave about the 1/6 insurrection] — which, to be sure, Trump gave just last week at a Univision town hall — is that it doesn’t serve Trump’s own interests. He needs to reassure people about this. That’s the problem with lacking the restraint that most of us have. That restraint helps us act strategically, carefully. When I described the way politicians calculate their answers earlier, I wasn’t insulting them. There is a reason they do that. When JD Vance showed up at the vice-presidential debate as a kinder, gentler, more accommodating version of himself, all that anger and contempt sanded off, he did that for a reason. He inhibited himself to achieve his goals. But Trump has no ability to do the same. That is why he lost the debate with Harris so decisively. When he is pressured, when he is emotional, he cannot stop himself. He can’t inhibit himself. Here he is on “Fox and Friends,” being lobbed an easy question, a softball, about making nice with Nikki Haley, whose help he could really use right now, whose help has been offered to him:

Trump: Nikki Haley and I fought, and I beat her by 50, 60, 90 points. I beat her in her own state by numbers that nobody’s ever been beaten by. I beat Nikki badly. I beat everyone else too badly.

If you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect. If you want to see him win it — which he does, which his staff does — that answer is insane. The man cannot help himself. He is missing the part of his mind that tells him what not to say, what not to do. He may be cunning and intuitive. He may know how to work a room and command a crowd. He may know how to spy the weakness in another person and dominate them. But he cannot control himself.

What is truly insane is that a man who has zero emotional control — who literally now has the mentality and emotional (under)development of a cranky toddler — is very much on the verge of getting elected president of the United States.

And, as Klein emphasizes, all the institutional barriers to the destruction that will be wrought by putting a vengeful child at the head of the government of the most powerful nation the world has ever seen are gone.