Honoré Victorin Daumier:
Very High and Mighty Legitimate Brats.
Peoples, defend yourselves, tear yourselves to pieces,
sacrifice yourselves for these royals,
you belong to them, imbeciles, plate 19 (1834)

"He firmly believes he's smarter than everyone else, which renders him the stupidest …"

On inauguration day, the adults will leave the administration, and a malignant narcissist will move in. He started TakingCredit for good things his predecessor accomplished before he even took office. He seems to maintain such a high opinion of himself that he simply cannot help himself. He seems to firmly believe that he is, indeed, the greatest. He accomplishes this astounding feat of self-esteem by steadfastly refusing to acknowledge anything he might have attempted that didn't quite make the grade. Indeed, his actual track record shows him mostly failing, though if you listen to him and his minions tell the story, he never fails. He will rather quickly begin identifying people who disappointed him. He claims to pick only winners, but his choices inevitably prove faulty. He will fein surprise then and insist that this seldom happens to him and that it was actually somebody else's fault that he selected a faulty incumbent. He maintains a queue of even better candidates, though he insisted before that his original list comprised only the best and brightest.

I will have to get used to having a malign eight-year-old in the highest office in the land. I will have to understand his limitations, prejudices, and blind spots and refuse to expect very terribly much from him. He will remain incapable of thinking either systemically or strategically. His logic will frequently escape me, but not as often as it escapes him. His judgment will very likely get no better than it ever was, and it was never better than abysmal. Still, the child will be the designated leader. He will boast about abilities he never mastered and accomplishments that will not have happened precisely as he requested. He will project a fog of fiction around his administration's operation, and nobody will understand whatever might occur in there, at least not until the eventual congressional investigation. When a child becomes the designated leader, most of their followers become children, too, often emotionally a tad younger than their leader. Our eight-year-old president will "manage" a five- and six-year-old kindergarten cabinet. They will mostly be at each others' throats.

I will adopt a new mantra that might help me remain mindful of what I witness. "A broken clock is still right twice each day." I will mumble my mantra as if that might ward away great evil. I expect great evil to intrude anyway. Much of it will be inadvertent, the product of studied ignorance and subpar intelligence. Our new president will be the most uncurious man ever to assume the responsibility. He has never once accepted responsibility for anything, except, of course, all the good things he never managed to influence. He does not praise good performance; he steals it for himself. He boasts, a sure tell that he feels fundamentally incapable inside. He spends much of his time TakingCredit. The balance he spends slandering his opponents. The louder he complains, the more threatened he feels. He will work hardest to maintain his already remarkably thin skin. He always was no more than the sum of his complaints.

He will launch endless inept attempts to take revenge upon his imagined enemies. This obsession alone should serve to prevent him from doing very much lasting harm. He will attempt to misuse the state, but the state will not prove to be nearly as malleable as he expected. His kindergartener cabinet members will mostly fail to find the levers and will waste their critical first hundred days squabbling and trying to avoid being blamed. They will try as hard as they can to prevent the truth from coming out. The truth will come out. They will misrepresent their progress to their boss, as he will have misrepresented his expectations when nominating them to their position. He will lie about his administration's progress while TakingCredit for it. Eight-year-olds feel no compunction against lying about everything, and they do not necessarily need to succeed at anything if they're just going to lie about the results, anyway. The executive branch should rather quickly slip into the dysfunction familiar from his first administration, a dysfunction the chief executive will recognize as the context he's most familiar with. It will feel like home to him and like Hell to most of the rest of us, especially his poor subordinates. We will all be cast as his subordinates because he represents the crown of creation to his immature mind. He firmly believes he's smarter than everyone else, which renders him the stupidest one in every room. Heaven, help us!

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz