Testing the Maturity of American Voters

I see the Toddler in Chief is in the news....

Photo by Julien L on Unsplash

Last week the New York Times’ Ezra Klein was kind enough to cite The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the American Presidency in his audio essay about Donald Trump. Klein observed that, “Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under” and “Trump does not see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he’s feeling. He does not listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. Donald Trump doesn’t really learn.”

Klein mentions The Toddler in Chief in part to explain why, if Trump is so immature and disinhibited, he did not cause more harm during his first term:

If Donald Trump is so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren’t worse? There is this gap between the unfit, unsound, unworthy man Democrats describe and the memories that most Americans have of his presidency, at least before the pandemic. If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?

There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child.

For the record, I have a slightly different, two-part answer to Klein’s question. First, Trump did wreak a lot of carnage, both before and during the pandemic. His trade policies triggered an industrial recession in 2019, and his refusal to acknowledge the coronavirus made a bad situation far worse during the pandemic. Trump was a bad president who left the executive branch in a parlous state, but many Americans have nostalgia for a pre-pandemic life.

Second, Trump’s inhibitors may have curbed some of his worst impulses,¹ but Trump proved to be his own worst enemy. He simply had no idea how to govern in his first term. He lacked impulse control, had frequent temper tantrums, displayed constant oppositional behavior, and had way too much screen time. All of these trends have worsened over the past four years. Furthermore, Trump also suffered from serious knowledge deficits. He had no idea where the levers of power were. Only in his last few months — when his staff was exhausted from four years of toddler management — did he appoint his purest sycophants and try to implement his more radical ideas.

Which leaves the United States, again, with the choice of a normal Democrat or the most immature leader in American political history who also happens to be pretty fascist in his worldview. One week out, the polls and the prediction models have the race as a toss-up.

The Toddler in Chief was published in early 2020, before that year’s presidential election. Here are the last two paragraphs in the book:

Trump did not receive a plurality of votes in 2016, so it is difficult to blame the American people for his Electoral College victory. That excuse will be harder to maintain if he wins reelection… Most Republicans who are still Republicans appear to be willing to live with Trump’s immaturity in return for tax cuts, conservative judges, and owning the libs.

Donald Trump is never going to grow up. Expecting him to mature is indulging in make-believe. It will be up to the American people, and not the Toddler in Chief, to set aside childish things. If voters re-elect Trump… then he is no longer the most immature American. The American elec­torate would be just as developmentally delayed as the 45th President. The true Toddlers in Chief would be us.

Americans face the same choice in 2024. And what I did not expect was to see Trump’s own supporters and surrogates making a weirdly parallel argument about the maturity of the American citizenry:

Someone with a stronger stomach than mine can write about Tucker Carlson’s weird psychosexual issues — that’s not the point of this newsletter.² The point is that in his own way, Carlson agrees with me. In his mind, if Americans elect Trump, it’s because they recognize that they are toddlers who need to be punished by Big Daddy Trump.

So, in a week, we will learn about the maturity of the median American voter. All I can say is that for those readers who know friends and relatives that are thinking about voting for Trump, tell them to grow up and act their age.

1. It should also be noted, however, that as Elizabeth Saunders predicted, some of Trump’s worst surrogates also exploited his ignorance about the federal government to implement bad, bad policies.

2. Never forget, however, that during his first term Carlson also described Trump like he was a toddler.