When it Comes To Trump’s Behaviour, The Most Plausible Explanation Is The Stupidest: ‘The most aggressively simple-minded, crudely self-serving, absurdly moronic rationale you can think of’
Source: T_Shurt
When it Comes To Trump’s Behaviour, The Most Plausible Explanation Is The Stupidest: ‘The most aggressively simple-minded, crudely self-serving, absurdly moronic rationale you can think of’
Source: T_Shurt
19 Comments
It’s great we arnt talking about Epstein anymore. How many pedos were identified?
It can be put into three words: Very Mentally Unwell.
For the article:
Occam’s razor is the principle that the most plausible explanation of events is the simplest. Most often this is true. To account for Donald Trump, however, we need a different hermeneutical instrument.
Say hello to Occam’s kazoo: the principle that the most plausible explanation, so far as Trump is involved, is invariably the stupidest. To understand his motives at any given situation, pick the most aggressively simple-minded, crudely self-serving, absurdly moronic rationale you can think of. You will not be far wrong.
Take the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. Leave aside its arrant illegality, or the hugely destabilizing implications globally. Why did Mr. Trump do it?
A number of analysts claim to have detected some grand strategic design at work. Surely it was intended to restrict the supply of oil to Mr. Maduro’s sponsors in Cuba. Or no, it was another move in the great game with China, depriving it of an important foothold in South America.
It is enough to debunk these hypotheses to ask oneself: do these bits of four-dimensional chess bear any resemblance to any previous act of Mr. Trump’s? Do they accord with anything we know about him? Or if you insist on seeing sophisticated geopolitical strategy where there is none: how is it “taking Venezuela off the board” if you leave the Maduro regime in power, sans only Mr. Maduro himself?
Certainly we can discount the idea that restoring democracy or freedom to Venezuela had anything to do with it: the Trump administration has been quite explicit about that, and if it were not, the abrupt dismissal of María Corina Machado, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the democratic forces in Venezuela, left no room for doubt.
Neither is Mr. Maduro’s alleged role as a narco-terrorist of any serious import. There’s little doubt of his involvement in the trade. But almost none of it reaches the United States. Colombia supplies 84 per cent of U.S. cocaine; neither is Venezuela a significant source of fentanyl.
At any rate, just how seriously Mr. Trump takes official involvement in drug trafficking can be seen in his pardoning, barely a month ago, of the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, for the same crime.
So it’s all about the oil? I don’t doubt this is top of mind for many in the Trump administration. Mr. Trump himself, in his cheerfully corrupt fashion, cites that as his primary motivation. That doesn’t mean it was, or that it would make any sense if it were. The U.S. is a net oil exporter. Prices are already falling. The last thing it needs is a massive new source of supply depressing prices further.
Not that that’s likely to happen any time soon. Venezuelan oil is of a peculiarly sludgy variety, expensive to drill and even more expensive to transport. Just to build the infrastructure needed to recover it in any large quantity is estimated to cost at least US$100-billion. And the regime’s history of corruption and arbitrary expropriations makes any substantial foreign investment vanishingly unlikely.
Rather than theorize about what animated Mr. Trump, I think we should rely on the testimony of those closest to him – what they tell us his motives were. These include: his irritation at seeing Mr. Maduro dancing in public; his pique that Ms. Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he has openly coveted (if she had turned down the prize, according to a Trump confidant, “she’d be the president of Venezuela today”); his apparent endorsement of the belief that the Maduro regime was involved in rigging the 2020 presidential election against him.
To this add the advice he was no doubt given, that abducting Mr. Maduro would be easy, dramatic, and popular. Well, it was two of the three: Just 33 per cent of respondents told an Ipsos poll they approved of the operation, a day later. And that’s before the U.S. is plunged into the inevitable morass of “running” Venezuela, a subject to which Mr. Trump has evidently given zero thought.
Was there also a deal with Vladimir Putin, an exchange of “spheres of influence,” in which the U.S. leaves Ukraine to Russia, in return for Russian acquiescence in U.S. designs on Venezuela? Quite possibly – just so long as no one confuses this with statesmanship. Whatever may account for Mr. Trump’s desire to please Mr. Putin, Nixonian realpolitik is not it.
What unites Mr. Trump and his officials is a desire to dominate. But whereas the lunatics and fanatics around him appeal to various crackpot theories to justify their urges – bastardized Monroe Doctrines, phoney “pivots” to China, neo-pseudo-realism – with Mr. Trump the domination is sufficient motive in itself. The id is all there is.
When you have a nation with this unhealthy, over-the-top patriotism, where they see themselves as almost divinely chosen, a shining beacon, the biggest, the best, blah blah blah, mixed with insane inequality, a downright inhumane system, and a weird obsession with guns, it’s a recipe for disaster. America is full of decent people, but it’s never really figured out how to build a decent society.
From a global perspective, the big decay of the U.S. began in 2001. What is happening now is the result of a series of events that have already taken place. Nothing occurs in a vacuum. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 after witnessing the U.S. carry out a similar action in Iraq just a few years earlier. The war in Ukraine can be seen as an escalation of that dynamic. Now the U.S. is going full bunker mode, taking whatever it believes is theirs. The significance of 9/11 cannot be underestimated. It marked the beginning of internal unrest that gradually spilled out into the world. It also represented the peak of American power. In the end, Bin Laden won.
People with a similar mindset once seized power in Russia. They have established an authoritarian regime and rules that benefit only them and their descendants. They try to drive anyone who doesn’t agree with these rules crazy and drive them to suicide. This is how they eliminate potential opponents and those who think differently.
Why does the flair say no paywall when the article is locked behind a paywall?
Epstein files.
Trump’s Alzheimer’s Disease grows worse by the day which is why his loyalists have him take mental cognitive tests every six months or so these days.
They know we all see it which is why they’re covering their own backsides for after he leaves office.
Refreshing to read something that was written by a literate human capable of sticking his head out the window and detecting that it is raining. Contrast with the average NYT drivel.
The way he grabbed is fake peace prize. The childish glee. Thats him that is all of him
He’s going to do what ever he chooses to do, as those did before him, and he clearly plays games with the media and politics, at this point he could do pretty much anything, and you can’t trust a word from his mouth, and at the same time know anything that comes from his mouth is maybe the exact action he would like to achieve.
xD
Funny how every time i try to give him credit my brain files for unemployment
if you can think like a malignant narcissist, you’ll get it.
Occam’s Kazoo. I like this. I’m going to have to add it to my rotation.
It’s about the Epstein Files. He will burn it all to the ground to avoid facing the music.
For Trump himself, his primary motivation re. Venezuela is a chance to be a big strong president man doing big military president things with his big strong generals. Any other consideration is secondary.
It’s that oil execs bribed him and Putin exchanged it for Ukraine. It’s not 4D chess it’s typical Republican corruption.
Yes all of those things while people from P2025 undermine the government and work to turn us into a Christian Totalitarian state. Trump is a dangerous clown, but there are more dangerous clowns using his antics as cover.
This theory, [Trump’s Razor](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trump%27s+Razor), was added to Urban Dictionary in 2016, and has been as predictive as anything else.