They’re writing think pieces about a guy who doesn’t
By 
Commenters Thom and WeWantPie pointed to this brilliant piece of analysis from Tim Kreider. What’s brilliant about it is that it states what should and in some sense is obvious, but does so with a kind of straightforwardness that for reasons the piece explores is very difficult for all the Very Smart and Serious People to achieve. I’m currently wrestling with much this same problem in the form of an 83,537-word book draft (and counting), so I’m all the more impressed with the concision and lucidity on display here.
Krieder insists that the key facts about Trump are that he’s extremely stupid and incurious, and he has literally zero interest in any other person or subject.
His motivations are equally simple: stealing all the money in the world, getting all the attention in the world, and staying out of prison. Kreider notes these goals are in a constant inherent tension, since criming in obvious and stupid ways while constantly pointing to your obvious stupid criming is not usually a good way to stay out of prison, but that’s what the Meritocracy is for I suppose.
Kreider’s thesis is that the conspiratorial versions intended to explain the media’s sanewashing of these truths are too reductive in a sort of crude materialist fashion. It’s not just that the owners of the corporate media want to make money and the journalists working for them want to stay employed, although obviously these are factors. It’s that it’s just impossible to believe that someone like this could be in the position he’s in, because that’s flat-out insane on its face, so there must be some deeper truths to plumb here. His argument is that there aren’t.
“Sanewashing” is what critics call the journalistic tendency to try to describe and explain Trump in the language of conventional politics, presuming that it’s a media conspiracy to normalize his pathology and gaslight us all into thinking we’re overreacting. There may be some truth to this, but I think the explanation is more complicated; people who have spent their careers covering politics simply don’t have a vocabulary for what’s happening now; they’re like noir detectives in a slasher film. There’s no real precedent for someone who wields more power than any other individual in human history simply having no idea what he’s doing, or behaving with such naked, shameless self-interest. They can’t not report on what the President said or did that day; but it’s too terrifying, unimaginable, to acknowledge that the guy with access to the nuclear codes knows much less about geopolitics than your fourth-grader, or that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is way lower on his to-do list than building that bigass arch. Two days ago, after Trump dismissed the Iranian leadership, whom he’d earlier called “smart, strong people” as “scum,” I got to listen to a White House correspondent halfheartedly float the notion that the abrupt contradiction might’ve been a bargaining tactic, struggling to avoid the conclusion that nothing the President of the United States says really means anything much at all.
People go to such convoluted lengths to avoid this elegant explanation not only because they’re hobbled by erudition; they’re also blinkered by their own sanity and humanity. You know that apocryphal test question to identify psychopathy, about a woman who meets a man she’s attracted to at her mother’s funeral, but she doesn’t get his number, so she murders her sister? By psychopathic logic, this is a reasonable gambit in hopes of seeing the guy again. Although this isn’t an actual clinical test, it does illustrate both Trump’s motives and reasoning as well as normal people’s difficulty in grasping them. Trump’s strategy seems nonsensical only if you assume that he factors the effect of his decisions on anyone else into his calculations.
It seems scarcely credible that someone would, say—just to pose a ludircously implausible scenario—start a war with a major power at no provocation, forfeiting thousands of lives, driving up oil prices and destabilizing the whole world order, just to distract people from a personal scandal. The moral calculus seems insanely imbalanced; it’s like solving the trolley problem by diverting the train to run over forty orphans because there’s a Kit-Kat bar lying on the other branch of the tracks. But of course Donald Trump would do that: why would he not? He wants a Kit-Kat.
The thing about Donald Trump is that he is a deeply uninteresting man, because there’s nothing there. As Kreider says, his biographers are going to have to pad out their manuscripts with a lot of background description and glossy photos because there are no tortured Nixonian psychological depths to explore here.
What’s interesting, I hope anyway, is exploring the question of how the world’s richest and most powerful country, inheritor of one of the world’s oldest and most successful at least semi-liberal democratic systems of government, could have put this one-dimensional at best psychopath in the White House.
As to where all this is now heading, you might want to put a little whiskey in your cornflakes:
Following the psychopathic logic of Donald Trump to its reductio ad eschaton leads us to scenarios that are best contemplated alone, late at night, over a glass of strong spirits. We already know that he cannot accept losing under any circumstances; he throws tantrums and insists he won and complains that it’s not fair and accuses the other side of cheating and basically behaves like the kind of crybaby you’d never let play kickball with you ever again. We know for a fact that he would not stop at sedition or insurrection, that he’d incite a riot and sic a violent mob on Congress, in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election he lost, because he already has. What would he do if he felt a Democratic congress were about to take away all of his power and status and riches—or his freedom? What if he were faced with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in federal prison? He could always flee to a cushy gilded exile in Qatar or Russia, but Trump has said, and demonstrated many times, that he’s a “fighter.” What would that fight involve—a fight for his survival? Can you seriously envision Donald Trump ever saying, about anything: “No, that’s going too far”? Maybe an easier question to consider is: what wouldn’t he do?