For this reason, among others, the founders rejected hereditary authority. They embraced a republican vision of government that sought to place power in the hands of what Thomas Jefferson called an “aristocracy of talent and virtue,” carefully elected by educated, property-holding citizens. The founders designed many limits on who could vote, but they believed that voters were more reliable than genetics in choosing qualified leaders. If anything, the children of wealth and power appeared most likely to become corrupt and foolish because of their privileged upbringing. Revolutionary leader Samuel Adams put it well: “The cottager may beget a wise son; the noble, a fool. The one is capable of great improvement; the other, not.”

Over two centuries the United States has diversified the range of candidates and voters, and the founders’ vision has largely borne out. Americans have generally chosen competent people for higher office, especially when it comes to the White House. There has obviously been wide variation in talent and virtue, but all presidents, before the current one, strove to meet the challenges of the nation’s highest office, using the power they held to serve the national interest, as they understood it. Many presidents rose to the challenge. Most presidents surrounded themselves with highly qualified, hard-working advisers, even as they adhered to partisan prejudices.

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Donald Trump breaks the mold, according to Daniel Drezner. He is the first elected American Caligula, Nero or Commodus, proving that the founders’ reliance on voters could mimic the worst effects of hereditary corruption. In his book “The Toddler in Chief,” Drezner does not simply argue that Trump is ill-suited for the presidency; he contends that Trump is incapable of adult behavior. “Across a range of behavioral and cognitive traits — temper tantrums, a short attention span, impulse control, oppositional behavior, and knowledge deficits — Trump has much more in common with small children than with the 43 men who preceded him.” Edward Gibbon wrote similar things about the mad Roman emperors and the serious statesmen who had built the empire that they destroyed.

The power of “The Toddler in Chief” comes from the overwhelming evidence that Drezner presents. As he explains in the introduction, he began by collecting tweets, interviews and articles where Trump’s allies — not critics — commented on his childlike behavior. By late 2019 Drezner had amassed more than 1,000 documented reports. These are sourced from people who are trying to help the president and promote his agenda. They are credible witnesses to his actions.

The list includes Cabinet members, Oval Office advisers, Republican Party officials and, most startling, the president himself. Drezner reprints the words attesting to Trump’s infantile behavior. My personal favorite: When inspecting a firetruck at the White House, Trump entered the truck, honked the horn and stated: “Where’s the fire? I’ll put it out fast.”

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The firetruck story would be harmless if it weren’t so representative. Unlike any previous president, Trump disdains intelligence briefings, preferring to watch four to eight hours of television each day, often during meetings with his advisers. He reads little, and many of his supporters question how much he listens. Trump rarely focuses on an issue for more than a few minutes (or seconds). He acts almost always out of impulse, leaving his staff unprepared for his rapid shifts of direction. Frequently, Drezner shows, the implementers of Trump’s impulses do not even understand what he is trying to do. And most frightening of all, Trump does not care about facts or truth or even results. All that matters is that he looks strong, like a winner. From negotiations with North Korea (which have failed to limit Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal) to the coronavirus crisis (which the president initially ignored), the facts are rewritten on the fly to affirm the president’s self-image.

We knew most of these things about Trump before Drezner published his book, but he presents a smothering avalanche of repeated presidential absurdity. The reader realizes that this pattern is not part of the Trump presidency; it is the whole thing. There is nothing more. Every day, every issue, every presidential decision is driven by the same impulses. There is no executive leadership or attention to the national interest. As Drezner shows, Trump has worn down and chased away all the “care-givers” who tried to protect some semblance of sanity.

Reading Drezner’s book in the context of the coronavirus pandemic has convinced me that American citizens really must take the absurdity of Trump’s childishness seriously. It is not a joke or a strategy, and it is not something imagined by his adversaries. Again, Trump’s closest advisers and supporters are the evidence for Drezner’s descriptions.

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“The Toddler in Chief” closes with an analysis of how the historical growth of presidential power over military affairs, foreign policy, immigration and the basic welfare of citizens increases the damage from an incompetent president. If an imperial presidency threatens democracy, a childlike presidency can be apocalyptic. Writing in December 2019, Drezner’s worst fears have come to fruition: “The idea of Trump coping with a true crisis — a terrorist attack, a global pandemic, a great power clash with China — is truly frightening.” Indeed.

Drezner’s call to action is obvious. Americans, and the rest of the world, cannot afford to have a toddler in charge much longer. This must be a one-time mistake, an exception to the pattern of presidential selection begun more than two centuries ago. Above all, Americans must insist on competence, intelligence and maturity in electing leaders. That means abandoning partisanship and apathy to act like “adults,” in Drezner’s words.

Can we do this as a society? That remains to be seen. The willingness of millions of Americans to self-quarantine for public safety is encouraging. But we still need a sustained commitment to competent leadership at all levels of government. American democracy can probably awake from four years of childishness; more contemporary echoes of Caligula, Nero or Commodus might repeat the Roman nightmare.

The Toddler in Chief

What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency

By Daniel W. Drezner