Acclaimed journalist and author Kurt Andersen has unlocked the secret behind Donald Trump’s appeal to his own voters.
Speaking to The Daily Beast Podcast’s Joanna Coles about the president’s actions overseas, including most recently in Iran, Andersen claimed Trump has “no clue” about the history of Iran and the Middle East.
“He’s an idiot. He’s always been stupid. And his stupidity has been an under-remarked-upon, unheralded part of his—long with the lying, along with the mental disorders—the stupidity is important.”
The Daily Beast has meticulously documented the president’s visible decline since his return to the White House, including interviewing medical experts who believe his obvious cognitive decline is the result of a serious medical event like a stroke. More than 60 percent of Americans believe that Trump has become increasingly erratic with age.
Andersen argues that the president’s stupidity, which predates his recent decline, is a feature that appeals to a broad swath of the voting public.
Discussing his 2017 book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire; A 500-Year History, which he notes was written prior to Trump’s election, Andersen claims America has a weakness “for being conned.”
He points to the religious history of the U.S. and its role in shaping the country’s national character, highlighting the foundational belief of, “I can believe what I want because it’s the truth and it feels right.”
“All that stuff, which is not uniquely American, but it is definingly American,” Andersen explained. “America has always been the world leader in that kind of weak-mindedness and slippery sense of the difference between reality and fiction.”
Coles mentioned infamous con artist and showman P.T. Barnum, whom Andersen discusses in his book and whom she describes as succeeding at “having people in on the con,” referencing an instance where people lined up to see a woman he claimed was 161 years old.
Barnum is famous for co-founding the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and promoting numerous hoaxes before later entering politics.
“I mean, his first freak show was a 161-year-old woman,” Coles said. “Obviously not true. Who was the nurse to George Washington. Obviously not true. And yet people lined up to see this thing, which they knew wasn’t true. And that’s the sort of sophisticated nature of P.T. Barnum: having the audience in on the con and yet still paying to see her.”
“He didn’t hide it,” Andersen agreed. “He didn’t pretend it was true. He said, ‘How do you know it’s not?’ [That] was basically his response to people. If you can’t prove it’s not and people enjoy it, then that’s entertainment.”
Andersen labels the question of whether Trump believes his tales as “the operative question with all of them. All of the great ones.” ”In the end, I think his deep animating feature as a person is the most horrible, unpleasant, miserable, wretched, cynicism about human behavior,” he says, but adds, “It’s a good bet that he believes more of it than he did in the past.”
Barnum’s understanding, as Andersen explains in his book, was that attention is what matters, not the truth. This approach would later be adopted by Trump and those who elevated him to national prominence.
“It’s just such an American story,” Andersen said of Trump’s ascendancy. “This combination of religiosity, I guess sincere, and this kind of hucksterism. And that’s part of the story of America and how Trump came to be, even though he is irreligious and a nonbeliever, I think, pretty clearly.”
“But his most devoted supporters are evangelical Christians, because once you get a country in which so much belief in any old thing you want and hear and disbelief in things that are true, anything goes.”
“That wasn’t always the case,” Andersen notes. “It always tended to be the case in America a little bit, but then it got out of control in the last 60 years and, along with the internet, gave us Donald Trump.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
