Max Boot joins the swelling Republican chorus of regret over the ascendancy of Donald Trump. His observation that “After nearly five months in office, Trump has given no indication that he possesses the mental capacity to be president” is like calling 911 today to report the Hindenburg crash, so the questions aren’t so much about Trump’s mental capacity. They're about the GOP’s mental capacity, including that of Max Boot; about how calculated and deliberate that mass incapacitation was; and about who gets the blame for it.
Boot soberly submits his exhibits as though additional evidence is required. Yes, Trump wasn’t sure that Presbyterians are Christians or who exactly are the evangelicals. Trump credits himself with inventing the phrase “priming the pump”. Trump seems not to have understood that Israel is in the Middle East. Nobody’s arguing with any of this, and cataloguing Trump’s ignorance would take more time than any reader has, so thanks Max. The prosecution can rest.
Besides, Trump’s stupidity isn’t the problem. The problem is, Trump is president. He needed the willing support of the GOP and its voters to get the bully pulpit in the first place. Trump isn’t alone here, after all.
Are the Max Boots of the world just figuring out that a man who has made a decades-long career of spectacular stupidity wasn’t ever fit to lead them? Apparently yes.
Are they facing the questions of how their party was so riddled with idiots that Trump needed only to stampede those idiots to take it over? Apparently no.
Can the Right’s intellectuals admit that they made careers encouraging and weaponizing voter stupidity and then pointed it at their political adversaries? And can the intelligentsia such as Max Boot, David Brooks, Jennifer Rubin, the mastheads of National Review and The American Conservative and the conservatives at The New York Times and The Washington Post take due credit for decades of infantilizing and incapacitating the Republican base to this costly point? Apparently no.
Thanks to the Boots and the Right-wing media and the party propagandists, have Republican voters reached a critical mass of Chernobyl-level ignorance that has finally destroyed Conservatism and blown the Republican Party to pieces? Apparently yes.
No wait. Yes. Definitely yes.
All the Max Boots can scrub their hands with Ajax, Lysol, and desperation, but the damned spots won’t come out. For decades the GOP hasn’t just been a political party; it’s been an epistemological alternative to the reality based community, with the mission of crediting, supporting, and financing a whole thought system based on lies and fantasies. That thought system elevated the Laffer Curve to a religion, polluted classrooms with Creationism, burned trillions of dollars on failed wars of choice, and made money into speech. It made intellectual pathogens like Karl Rove, Frank Luntz, Ralph Reed, Sean Hannity, Drudge, and Fox and Friends, et al., rich and powerful (it’s a much longer list than this, yeah, but we don’t have all day) and put the likes of George Bush, Jerry Bremer, Louie Gohmert, Dave Brat, Sarah Palin, and Betsy DeVos, et al., in the halls of power (it’s a much longer list than this, yeah, but we don’t have all month).
And oh yes, Max Boot. Boot served on the faculty of a school that educated its voters to think that their beliefs are and should be true, regardless of evidence. In that school you could think that science is a matter of belief; that measurement depends on the measurer; that empirical reality doesn’t exist in the first place, and that if you cover your eyes facts just go away. In other words, you could be Donald Trump. You could be bottomlessly stupid, and if you had money and hubris enough you could make bottomless stupidity a political asset in a party that made bottomless stupidity the heart of its brand.
The irony is painful, which suggests that Max Boot is sitting on a ring cushion as he explains Donald Trump’s shortcomings. Trump isn’t an outlier in the GOP that Boot and his colleagues created. He’s the quintessential Republican. That school where Boot serves is the real Trump University. Of course Trump graduated at the top, because in that GOP it didn’t matter what you didn’t know; all that mattered was who you could swindle. It didn’t matter what the facts were; all that mattered was the narrative. It didn’t matter whether there were WMD or whether deficits mattered or what the science said on climate change or evolution or tobacco. What mattered was how you could sow doubt, buy time, and get away with lying to people’s faces and make them all like it. Communicators like Max Boot did well indeed when all that was conveyed with a little discretion. Now their act looks dated, stuffy, boring. The Max Boots are on the outside now because Republican voters who grew up on their steady low doses of lunatic subjectivity now want 151 proof white lightning meth-drenched venom, not long sentences and foppish prigs telling them to tone it down. Trump’s their dealer now. He sells the pure item. Those voters love Trump because in today’s GOP, the mental capacity to be president means nihilism and cruelty, willful, prideful, and raging.
You have to laugh when Boot suggests that “The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet certify that the president is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,’ he can be removed with the concurrence of two-thirds of both houses.” Boot is just smart enough to understand that “That won’t happen, because Republicans are too craven to stand up to Trump.” What he isn’t smart enough to say is that he owns a measure of that craven gutlessness. He helped to build it. Then again maybe Boot and the intelligentsia such as David Brooks, Jennifer Rubin, the mastheads of National Review and The American Conservative and the conservatives at The New York Times and The Washington Post are just too craven themselves to say how much they had to do with making mental incapacity the foundation of the GOP.