For many, watching a sweaty Donald Trump give himself high praise for being able to pass a cognitive test that awards points for accurately identifying a picture of an elephant is oddly reassuring. Liberals, #NeverTrumpers, and other hopeful humans have had difficulty covering their glee. Mocking Trump’s person-woman-man-camera-TV buffoonery and how it illustrates his diminished or diminishing mental capacity is gratifying.

Speaking of buffoonery—because it’s more pleasant than what I’ll speak of next—a former student of mine sent me his proposal for a new cognitive test. He calls it the Idaho Cognitive Assessment (IdCA). Here’s what he wrote:

Listen, I’ve been making up five item memory tests for myself lately, and I ace them every time. For example, I’ll list off the names of my three kids, Monica, and our dog, and when I try to remember them a minute later, it’s easy for me. It’s not easy for everyone, but it’s easy for me. I even give myself extra points if I get them in order.

The IdCA is a fabulous and perfect parallel to the Donald Trump Cognitive Assessment (DtCA).  Using his clever spontaneity, Trump made up the DtCA on the spot while being filmed by a person, a woman, a man, a camera, and a TV. Just for the record, although the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) isn’t especially difficult, it’s harder than the IdCA and the DtCA. But because Trump lies about everything we still don’t really know if could identify an elephant, remember five items, or pass the MoCA.

What I wish (and, I suspect, many others) is that Donald Trump was only a sweaty buffoon making a comedic cameo on Fox News. But, sadly, he’s more than a sweaty buffoon; he’s a dangerous sweaty buffoon, serial liar, and incompetent leader who’s putting the future of the United States and planet Earth at risk. What I fear is that while gloating over his buffoonery, we’ll forget that Trump is also an evil genius.

Trump is a once-in-a-century antisocial demagogue. If you don’t know what that means, check out my Slate article or this blog post: https://johnsommersflanagan.com/2018/11/05/my-closing-argument-take-a-breath-check-your-moral-compass-and-vote-for-checks-and-balances-in-government/.

Trump has a particularly unsavory personality type. Documentation of this personality type goes back to Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus (371 – 287 B.C.), who wrote:

The Unscrupulous Man will go and borrow more money from a creditor he has never paid . . . . When marketing he reminds the butcher of some service he has rendered him and, standing near the scales, throws in some meat, if he can, and a soup-bone. If he succeeds, so much the better; if not, he will snatch a piece of tripe and go off laughing (from Widiger, Corbitt, & Millon, p. 63).

About 2000 years later, the famous American physician, Benjamin Rush, picked up on Theophrastus’s theme, becoming intrigued with what was briefly called moral insanity. In cases of moral insanity, individuals are capable of clear and lucid thought, but repeatedly engage in irresponsible, immoral, and destructive behaviors without experiencing guilt or shameless. These shameless criminals act boldly, but without moral compass, believing that only they could possibly divine the true and correct way forward. In an apt description of Trump’s everyday behavior, Rush wrote: “Persons thus diseased cannot speak the truth upon any subject” (1812, p. 124).

Although predicting the future is always inexact, Trump’s personality type provides a reasonable foundation. That being the case, my personality-based predictions for Trump’s future behaviors are below—along with ways in which we, as U.S. citizens interested in the continuation of a democratic republic—can respond.

1. Trump will tell more and bigger lies. As threats to his presidency and risks of defeat loom, Trump’s lies will grow in size and frequency. The good news is that Trump’s lies will grow more obvious, and hopefully the American public and media can leverage them to further grow opposition.
2. Trump will continue to show poor judgment, principally because he’s the only one who living in his personal decision-making echo chamber. Trump’s logic and gut are impaired. His decisions will continue to often be wrong and dangerous. The good news about Trump’s poor judgment is that if the media can pounce on his upcoming egregiously bad decisions, the public may continue to grow in their distrust of him.
3. Trump will deflect responsibility. Trump’s moral philosophy includes complete opposition to taking responsibility for mistakes. This pattern will continue. As in the past, he’ll blame others (e.g., Obama, Biden, Clinton) for things they’ve never done. In many cases, his deflecting responsibility will include abject projection (Crooked Hillary was clearly a projection by Crooked Donald). Trump’s tendency to project his own criminal behavior onto others can provide leads to what he’s doing. Also, and this is critical, EVERYTHING Trump does needs to be framed as the responsibility of every individual member of the GOP, until and unless they split from him.
4. To compensate for his slagging physical and intellectual abilities, Trump will become increasingly desperate to look strong. The bad news is that Trump posturing may translate into more tear gas, more fomenting of foreign conflict, and more steps toward martial law. The good news is that he cannot stop himself from looking and acting pathetic . . . and as organizations like the Lincoln Project target Trump’s weakness and pathetic efforts to appear competent, they’re proving their exceptional media savvy.
5. Trump will stoke division and inflame hatred. This is a common Trumpian strategy. The good news is that many Americans are aware of this strategy and can compensate with unification. The other good news is that if polls continue downward, Trump won’t be able to resist stoking division within his own ranks.
6. Trump will continue to seek profit and praise to assuage his battered ego. Again, the more desperate his follows this path, the more likely he is to make mistakes, and the more opportunities there are to catch him, red-handed, in criminal activity.
7. Trump will continue in his role as influence-peddler in chief. Trump will use money, power, legal intimidation, and any leverage he can find to recruit and embolden followers. The details of how he accomplishes this and the psychological vulnerability of ForeverTrumpers is grist for another mill, but count on it to continue, and count on it to continue to seem completely irrational.

I know there’s nothing much new here. But the point is that now and into the future we need to maintain a planned and proactive attack on Trump’s competence, with unwavering focus on catching him and holding him accountable for the many lies, mistakes, and criminal activities he will be engaging in for the next 100 days. We know Trump is an immensely narcissistic compulsive liar who lacks basic self-awareness and seems unable to muster up empathy or compassion for anyone other than his loyal, criminal, and sycophantic followers—even when those followers happen to have deep links to pedophilia or the Russian mob. However, we also know that these traits were in place four years ago, and he was elected anyway. That’s why, right now, as we enter the home-stretch, we all need to be focused like a laser on deconstructing his genius while simultaneously, exposing his weaknesses, his criminal activities, and every manifestation of his pathetic buffoonery . . . as he makes his way down the slippery metaphoric ramp toward November 3, 2020.