What I mean by that is as we age we seem to get more and more stuck in our ways, unable to break out of patterns we have established. Trump seems to default to typical patterns, such as witch hunt for personal wrong doings, previous admin did it for anything negative, take full credit for anything positive and the list goes on a bit, but critical thinking (or any thought) doesn’t seem part of the process. I can’t recall any actually thinking demonstrated by the prez, just everything shoved into old predictable patterns. Has he shown any signs of actually thinking?
Comparing Trump 47 to 45, he has learned a lot about how to control the government.
Not as far as I can tell.
Penn Jillette, who worked with him on “The Apprentice” and got to know him a bit, has said that two things really stuck out to him about Trump.
The first is that he has never seem him laugh. Non genuinely, at least. He’s seen him laugh at the expense of others, but aside from that, there seems to be no actual awareness of humor within him.
The second is that Trump has zero appreciation of any sort of music. He seems unable to enjoy music in any form.
Jillette says (I’m paraphrasing) that Trump may be the only person he’s ever met who demonstrates either of these behaviors, let alone both.
mmm
I speculate that a lot of history has been created by elderly leaders undergoing mental decline. There was an elderly lady who was a member of my church congregation; and while she was a dear beloved by everyone, by the time she had to go into a nursing home she was running on automatic pilot 80-90% of the time.
That would be a way to reconcile my impression of Trump as a typical elected autocrat skillfully consolidating power with the impression of others that he is in mental decline. Is there something about mental decline that helps make you a more powerful dictator? Maybe it helps you ignore unnecessary detail and concentrate on the main point.
As for the elderly part, I myself posted, in past years, that this made Trump less dangerous. I was wrong.
Trump is sufficiently vigorous and mentally astute to do what he has set out for himself.
It makes you more pliable and controllable by those pulling the strings (i.e., Heritage Foundation) and therefore more effective as their puppet.
I’ve met several people in my 72+ years who exhibited absolute zero sense of humor, who seemed unable to laugh at anything any normal person would find amusing. I realize it’s probably unfair to judge a person’s character on something like this, but I’ve learned never to trust anyone who doesn’t have a sense of humor, and I’ve never been proven wrong.
Does anyone think Stephen Miller ever let’s loose with a good belly laugh?
No, and it doesn’t. Trump isn’t consolidating power because he’s a genius, but because he’s surrounded by a system designed to push people like him into positions of power and wealth, and by people who want to create a fascist government. A corpse could do as well, if the cultists maintained loyalty to it.
Trump doesn’t find things funny, or listen to music on its own behalf. He uses both to get certain reactions from people, nd if neither are around the music will not play and the humor will not be heard, let alone understood.
Trump’s priorities overlap with Heritage Foundation/Project 2025, but it’s more that Trump pushed them to embrace tariffs than vice-versa.
As for Greenland, looking at Project 2025 page 223, all they wanted was our opening a consulate there. The only canal mentioned is Suez. There are many mentions of Canada, but in the context of them being an ally, not a target for expansionism. Does this sound like what Trump is doing:
I’m not saying that passage of Project 2025 is at all typical. I’m just questioning that Trump is a passive vessel controlled by the Heritage Foundation.
Trump is actually thinking. The problem is that they are almost all bad thoughts.
Trump clearly has had a life long fascination with strongmen and at least a decades long obsession with tariffs. What may seem like thinking may be delusions based on these old fixations come to the fore once he lost the cognition to keep them in check.
His thought processes are those of a toddler.
He does remind me of the old joke of a gravestone labeled “Born 1910, Died 1930, Buried 1980”.
No. He does not really think about many things. Only real estate and who owes whom. The rest of it on TV is just “I don’t know anything about it” and repeating phrases from people around him. And doing things “very rapidly.”
If his thoughts were those of a normal competent dictator, how would we be worse off?
One possibility is that SDMB would be gone 
Maybe the problem with my thinking is that I see no association between morally good leadership and intelligence.
It’s early.
Although if we’re lucky he’ll think SDMB is some sort of bondage site and he’ll let us be.
A counter question for our OP, and to be clear, this isn’t snark or an attack, but in Trump’s specific case, I’m not sure the first line applies:
I think the argument can be made is that in his specific (again) case, he learned a set of behaviors at a comparatively early age (and he’s not alone in this) and has never appreciably changed them, rather than only falling into a reactive rut as he’s aged.
The “attack, attack, attack” and the “never admit to ever being wrong” seem to have been with him his whole adult life, based on Roy Cohn’s and his father’s teachings. And if he sticks with it, in part, it’s because it’s always worked for him, since he’s been so successful in cheating, borrowing, or otherwise slipping out of his various trials and tribulations.
But, and to be clear, I do NOT think highly of Trump, it’s arguable that such habitual ruts are not uncommon to many people who aren’t self-reflective, and who do not value judgements other than their own. They know they’re right, so why think about anything that might challenge that? So follow whatever their whim might be, which, honestly is very close to:
In short, I don’t think his actions are specifically because of his intellect (failing or not), but instead his (a)morality and poor impulse control.
He’s also the very definitive example of the phrase “white men can’t dance” (link to IMDB movie of that name)
Well, I do feel ties to this place…
Nate Wright, a British writer, agrees with you. Back in Trump’s first term, he posted an answer on Quora to the question “Why don’t the British like trump?”
A blogger has re-posted the whole thing, and it’s worth a read, but this passage sums it up:
I’ve said it before: it won’t be long before, like two negatives making a positive, trump’s dementia and advanced syphilis will combine to create a super brain which will solve all our problems. Two weeks tops.