I shouldn’t be surprised at this point.

And yet, here I am, with my mouth in a wide guffaw, and no words to explain the tragicomedy that is this president.

According to a Reuters report, NSC staff have devised a plan to deal with President “I’m, like, a smart person” Trump’s complete lack of adult-level attention span when it comes to daily security briefings: they put his name in them, as many times as they can.

Security staff have apparently learned to keep briefings to one page, and comprised predominantly of dot points, graphs, maps and photos—because apparently the cultural and political complexities of the world need to be conveyed in the form of a children’s storybook for them to be even minutely understood.

Startlingly (read: completely unsurprisingly), security staff have also learned that unless Trump sees his name mentioned multiple times, he simply stops reading.

That’s right. Trump’s enthusiasm for or ability to understand the world in which he is a major political influencer, revolves entirely around himself.

Combining this with previous reports that President Trump refuses to have security briefings daily because he’s a “smart person,” and he can apparently figure all of this out on his own like a big boy, I’m now truly terrified.

We joke—we all do—about the progress of this presidency, but underneath the jokes there’s real fear. How will we all survive in a world which already has an undercurrent of racial tension and sociopolitical conflicts, when its major leader is this unstable?

I’m starting to think we make so many jokes because if we didn’t, we’d all just go mad with terror, rage, and helplessness.

~

Author: Erin Lawson
Image: HBO
Editor: Lieselle Davidson