For the most part, criticisms of Donald Trump focus on issues of politics, law, and integrity. Nonetheless, regarding an American president now endowed with near-total decisional authority over nuclear weapons, a more fundamental concern should be Trump’s evident incapacity for logic-based reasoning. Though often minimized, underestimated, or overlooked, this conspicuous deficit could lead the US not “only” to mounting legal debilities (e.g., grievous violations of the law of war), but to wholly unprecedented military conflicts.
The next question is plain: What should be done to avoid such intolerable outcomes? Already, each day’s news is replete with well-founded condemnations of Trump’s logical failings, historical inaccuracies, and contrived conclusions. In more elevated parlance, the problem concerns what some would call a failing “paradigm.”
There are clarifying details. It’s time to get beyond variously partisan and piecemeal condemnations. This president’s demonstrated intellectual incapacities reflect more than a deficiency of erudition. They are the conspicuous result of self-inflicted analytic choices.
Understood as explanatory metaphor and parable, it’s no longer sufficient to point out that the American “emperor” is “naked.” It ought also to be acknowledged that Donald Trump wants to be visibly anti-intellectual. In his own words, it’s better to have the right “attitude” – a narrowly visceral expectation – than to make “preparations.”
Pertinent examples abound, most notably Trump’s first-term failure to control North Korean nuclear proliferation, his incessant incoherent tariff wars, and his fawning allegiance to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prima facie, Trump’s “peace” for Ukraine amounts to that suffering country’s self-annihilation. As for Israel, Trump’s neatly-delineated “peace” rests on (1) an “international stabilization force” comprised of Israel’s implacable enemies; and (2) a glaringly blind eye to Hamas rearmaments.
This American president takes great pride in the Abraham Accords, so-called “peace” agreements with countries that have never really been at war with Israel. Not many Israelis will sleep better at night knowing they will not be attacked by Morocco, Bahrain, the UAE, or Sudan.
Trump blames his predecessor
Elementary common sense dictates that Trump’s foreign policy “accomplishments” have usually been constructed ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” On both security and economic matters, this president’s standard defense of ad hoc policy-making underscores a basic logical fallacy. Known by logicians and scientists as the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, or simply “post hoc,” the inherently false argument insists that because a first event is followed by another, the second is a necessary result of the first. As timely examples, the US president blames the Russian aggression in Ukraine (which he wrongly calls a “war”) and American “affordability” problems on his predecessor.
But the truth is exculpatory. Even science-dismissing Trump loyalists should acknowledge that any post hoc argument is fallacious when it discounts or undervalues other potentially relevant explanations. In contrast to his argument on “affordability,” which places all economic blame on Joe Biden, Trump’s demand for stock-market credit ignores Biden altogether.
Another willful Trump manipulation of elementary logic concerns his relentless association of brute force with strategic truth. Known to formal logic as the argumentum ad baculum (“illegitimate appeal to force”), this fallacy is committed by Trump whenever he substitutes disjointed threats for disciplined reasoning. Here, honest analysts should bring to mind the president’s latest dealings with Venezuela and his earliest relations with North Korea – that is, before Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un “fell in love.”
In the arena of global geopolitics, a perpetually bewildering theater in which North Korea is already nuclear and Iran’s nuclear potential is anything but “obliterated,” the US president routinely seeks to persuade adversaries (present and potential) with crudely indiscriminate threats of punishment. Why should such all-or-nothing deterrent threats be unconvincing? Among other problems of prudential policy-making, this president has never bothered to learn that threat credibility and threat destructiveness can vary inversely.
US strategic deterrence must be based on a continuous range of credible retaliations, a spectrum of flexible and nuanced reprisals. To date, in the midst of steadily expanding US security policy incoherence, Trump has never convincingly calibrated specific American reprisals to specific enemy aggressions. In the Middle East, Trump’s ill-supported approach to Hamas/jihadi aggressions can never safeguard Israel. At best, his so-called “Board of Peace” represents unwitting self-parody.
A noteworthy fallacy of Trump's reasoning is correctly referenced as argumentum ad hominem. In this particular species of logical error, the American president tries to galvanize points of the moment by sidestepping the reason-backed logic of his current opponent and discrediting him/her for personal (and hence extraneous) reasons. To wit, seemingly unsympathetic politicians and unflattering news reporters are cheerfully reduced by Donald Trump to “horrible person” or “stupid” status.
A corrosive “flipside” of argumentum ad hominem is Trump’s escalating elevations of illegitimate intellectual authorities. Known widely as a devious technique of commercial advertising, these reciprocally fallacious arguments are intended to transfer the respect or reverence one may have for a pertinent authority from one domain to another. In these always-illogical transfers, the recipient or “transferee” has no relevant expertise.
The just-referenced fallacies represent only the most obvious expressions of Donald Trump’s offenses against reason. There have been many Trump manipulations of logic, including his identification with the audience deception (“I eat fast food and will always tell it like it is.”); flattery (“I’m so happy to be in the great state of______”); condemnation (“I’m so unhappy to bear witness to a state that is really just a ‘den of thieves.’”); alarm (“We now face the greatest threat to America ever......and only I can fix it.”); appeal to emotion (“You, my friends, have been neglected for too long; when I make American great again, you real Americans will be made great again.”); and alleged symmetrical responsibility (“Many sides are responsible for the rioting and violence in Charlottesville....There were many fine people on both sides.”)
Summing up, it’s high time for Americans to worry not only about their current president’s transgressions, but also his intellectual debilities. At some not yet determinable point, the American president’s shortfalls of logic-based reasoning could bring us to the brink of a nuclear war. Thinking about the new 2025 movie A House of Dynamite, continued American governance by a man who “learns only in his own flesh, a “mass man,” could confer final nuclear authority to Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. Such a now-plausible triumvirate would not “merely” defile Founding Father intentions for a reason-directed American Republic - it would be an unendurable threat to national and global survival.
The writer is the author of some early major books dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics and Security and Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy.