The Lazy Authoritarianism of Donald Trump

Donald Trump went to Capitol Hill last week to visit with House Republicans. According to most reports of the meeting, he rambled.

People present told the nonprofit news outlet NOTUS that the former president “treated his meeting as an opportunity to deliver a behind-closed-doors, stream-of-consciousness rant” in which he “tried to settle scores in the House G.O.P., trashed the city of Milwaukee and took a shot at Nancy Pelosi’s ‘wacko’ daughter.” It was “like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion.”

That same week, Trump met with a group of chief executives at the quarterly meeting of the Business Roundtable. Attendees, CNBC reports, were disappointed. “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one executive. Others said that Trump was “remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought and was all over the map.”

There is a good chance that by the end of the year, Trump will be president-elect of the United States. And yet with less than five months left before the election, he is no more prepared for a second term than he was for a first. He might even be less prepared: less capable of organizing his thoughts, less able to speak with any coherence and less willing to do or learn anything that might help him overcome his deficiencies.

Everything that made Trump a bad president the first time around promises to make him an even worse one in a second term.

When I say “bad” here, I don’t mean the content of Trump’s agenda, as objectionable as it is, as much as I do his ability to handle the job of chief executive of the United States. In a political culture as obsessed with drama and celebrity as our own, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the presidency is an actual job — one of the most difficult in the world.