Ideas, words don’t reach this guy.

It’s as if first the Galilean and Newtonian powered scientific revolution of the 17th century, and then the Enlightenment of the 18th., never happened. Does the President even know they ever took place, let alone what they accomplished? What they are still accomplishing and contributing to our lives?

Then has anyone ever made President Trump listen? Has Trump himself ever replied knowledgeably and appropriately to an interviewer’s questions? Has he ever changed his mind about anything in response to correction? Does he even have something we might call a mind? Wearing his heart on his sleeve, as he does at the rallies, may very well attract his base while hiding the absence of a mind. We know he watches a lot of cable TV, we know he tweets, or at least tells someone what he wants to say who will then tweet for him. But in all the thousands of tweets has there ever been even one idea of substance establishing the mind’s presence?

No. This a guy who seems to have come to us directly from a tribal hunter gatherer society, where there were minds but probably few ideas, probably no laws (a world without laws seeming to be what the president prefers), where the strong man or woman could pretty much say or do whatever he or she wanted to say or do, running over whatever other primate opposition there might have been.

This is the clown like figure who on this week’s New Yorker cover seems to be stepping out confidently into the modern world from what is probably his own dark, primitive, tribal past. Boisterously gleeful while thinking of the havoc his coming will wreak upon the rest of us.

In fact there is plenty of opposition to the clown from members of the president’s own cabinet, from the Congress, from the courts, although imminent but not yet in evidence, from the Supreme Court itself, and most strikingly of all from the classical liberal press, led by the Times and the Washington Post. But the opposition, other than that of the Press, is in pieces that never seem to come together and join in opposition to the president, thereby allowing the man in the Oval Office to pretty much have everything his own way….