Trump savant syndrome: clueless overall, but brilliant at one thing
Syria is the latest example of U.S. foreign policy in which Donald Trump gets it right while almost no one else, for or against him, does.
Of course they should leave. Their only justification was to stop Daesh, which exists due to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Iran and Turkey are nearby. They can handle it now, with Russia if necessary. Yet Trump’s own beloved generals, including former defence secretary Mad Dog Mattis — who quit over it — disagree.
His security adviser, John Bolton, tried to deviously undo the policy and got slapped by Turkey’s leader for it. Patrick Cockburn, in my opinion, the most reliable anglo journalist in the region, says: “In many ways, Trump has a better grip on what’s happening there than Bolton.” And Bolton has spent his life on this stuff!
How does Trump get these things right? We know he doesn’t read. We know he doesn’t think. Everyone else says the opposite. Yet he nails it.
In the past, he’d have been called an idiot savant, now it’s known as savant syndrome: clueless except for one thing, where he’s brilliant. Mozart is portrayed in Amadeus as an idiot savant: a sheer genius but only musically. Salieri, his rival, is the heart of the film. We identify with him because he’s real: limited in talent and frustrated, not a gifted narcissistic goofball. How did Trump get North Korea right? Every U.S. leader since the “temporary” 1953 truce missed it. The North wanted legitimacy and security, that’s why they went nuclear. They’d been decimated by bombing and hemmed in. Trump responded to that and may pull it off. The experts were uniformly dismissive.
I’d say he got NAFTA right too. It was a hellish deal, for U.S. and Canadian workers. He improved it significantly for them: killed the odious investor-state clause letting corporations sue for lost profits and raised wage standards — even in Mexico. Also killed the “energy proportionality” straitjacket. He overstates the benefits, but not as much as Clinton, Chrétien or Mulroney did.
Take his deployment of U.S. troops to the Mexican border. The whole antiimmigrant policy and rhetoric is despicable and self-serving. But in some larger sense he’s right: U.S. forces should defend their own country instead of smashing societies half a world away. He’s like Mozart in Amadeus: he seems to have no clear idea what he’s doing but it works in the overall context. He has no human or moral sense, no empathy, just this … knack. The others are Salieri.
Afghanistan’s an interesting case. He wants to withdraw. After 15 years there, things are worse. Then he goes too far and tries to explain the history. He says “Russia” (i.e., the U.S.S.R.) was “right” to invade in 1979 to prevent jihadi terror against itself. The experts pounced. MSNBC’S “progressive” beacon, Rachel Maddow, said nowhere “in nature” had such a stupid idea been uttered.
But in 1998, long after the Soviet invasion, former U.S. security head Zbigniew Brzezinski bragged that the U.S. had secretly funded jihadis like Osama bin Laden to infiltrate and terrorize the pro-Soviet Afghan regime. So Trump was right about “Russia” invading to stop terror — though wrong on the target: he likely conflated Afghanistan and Chechnya. Because he’s stupid and ignorant.
Maddow said Putin had coached him. Possibly. But he sensed that it made sense. And Putin didn’t whisper to him about NAFTA or North Korea.
None of this makes Trump less of a menace. He’s still Most Likely to Blow the World Up. But that would be his personality not his foreign policy instincts.
(His love for tyrants — Duterte, bin Salman — is about something else: his weakness for brutish male figures, probably starting with dear old dad.)
He takes these stances alone, none of his entourage concurs. Yet he doesn’t waver. He’s steady as a rock and just as dumb, though on everything else, he’s unstable as water. I have no idea how to explain it.
The term, idiot savant, has lost currency, rightly. It was offensive, yet Trump may be an exception. His own people call him a moron or, alternately, a “f---ing moron.” They say he’s like a child, which insults children. I’m going with idiot savant. More meticulously: Trump Idiot Savant Syndrome: TISS.