Stupid Is As Stupid Does

How dumb is Donald Trump? Pretty f'ing dumb -- and that's a serious governing crisis.

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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There Is No Bottom

Last week, President Trump tweeted a photo of the tattooed hands of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Even though Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that “he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles,” most sentient human beings understood that the letters M-S-1-3 were photoshopped onto Abrego Garcia’s hand to allegedly explain the meaning of his actual tattoos … except, it seems, the president of the United States.

President Trump insisted in a television interview that the man his administration mistakenly sent to a Salvadoran prison has the letters and numbers “MS-13” tattooed on his knuckles.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador who had been living in Maryland after entering the U.S. without authorization as a teen, has symbols tattooed on his knuckles that can be common among those without gang affiliations, including a marijuana leaf, skull, cross and a smiley face with X’s for eyes.

Trump posted a photo earlier in April on social media that appeared to show the tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s hand with “MS-13” digitally added above them. The White House has contended that the tattoos are affiliated with MS-13, a gang designated by the president as a foreign terrorist organization.

But in an interview with ABC News that aired Tuesday night, the president was adamant that Abrego Garcia’s knuckles were tattooed with the name of the gang.

“It says M-S-One-Three,” Trump said, dismissing ABC News correspondent Terry Moran’s pushback that the letters and numbers were added to the photo digitally.

In the interview, Trump insisted, “Do you want me to show the picture?”

After repeated attempts by Moran to move to a different subject, Trump declared: “He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles.”

Moran tried to explain that Garcia’s tattoos are interpreted as representing MS-13 (a view rejected by most experts on the gang), but Trump is unmoved, "It says MS-13,” he insists.

It’s worth watching the video to see how adamantly Trump claims he’s right.

This is so unbearably dumb that it arguably rivals, if not surpasses, the moment in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Trump suggested that one way to kill the coronavirus was to inject bleach or shine ultraviolet light inside the bodies of those infected.

As an FYI, here’s an actual photo of Abrego Garcia’s hands.

One of the things that I appreciate about my job is the constitutionally-protected right to routinely call the president of the United States a stone-cold fucking moron. But, make no mistake, I take no pleasure in describing the commander-in-chief as “a few fries short of a Happy Meal,” or the "living proof of the Dunning-Kruger effect." I would much prefer to have a president who is not “one shrimp short of a cocktail,” or “as sharp as a marble,” but alas, we don’t live in that America. Instead, because close to 80 million Americans failed to exercise their better judgment, we are stuck with a president who “fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

Still, even for Trump, this is a truly gobsmacking moment. And it’s not a distraction or a moment to point and laugh. It speaks to the point I made earlier this week about the president’s utter cluelessness. Trump is so remarkably dumb, so malleable, so blinkered, and so incapable of rational thought that it’s increasingly difficult to argue that he is even really in charge of his administration. Trump could, on his own, seek out independent information about Abrego Garcia’s tattoos. He could read any of the dozens of news stories that explain, in detail, the specifics of this case. However, it seems that Trump is overwhelmingly dependent on his staff for providing him with information and is incapable of (and I hate to use this phrase) doing his own research.

His staff has convinced him that a photo, likely edited with Microsoft Paint by Stephen Miller, shows something that no other person could possibly misinterpret — and that insane interpretation is informing actual public policy decisions. In the ABC news interview, Trump justifies keeping Abrego Garcia in El Salvador because, in his words, he is “a MS-13 gang member, a tough cookie, been in lots of skirmishes” — a supposition that is clearly driven by his astonishing belief that the man has “M-S-1-3” tattooed on his hands.

You couldn’t make this stuff up because no one would believe that it could happen. And yet, here we are. It’s really happening! I’m sorry if I’m becoming a broken record on this, but the president of the United States is cognitively incapable of performing his job, and, as I noted earlier this week, is likely being manipulated by his staff into advancing their policy preferences.

If we could spend months talking about Joe Biden’s alleged cognitive deficiencies, we should perhaps spend some time on Trump’s actual ones.

A Tale Of Two Tweets

Donald Trump in January

Donald Trump Today:

Musical Interlude