The incuriousness of Donald Trump

Why it matters that the president of the United States has no interest in learning anything about the world around him.

Of the many habits and characteristics that make Donald Trump unfit to be president, one trait in particular is more often mocked than considered in light of its real consequences: his fundamental incuriousness. It’s not just that Trump is indifferent to new information that doesn’t fit his existing worldview, or that he’s unwilling to seek out or confront intellectual challenges — it’s also that he appears to have no desire whatsoever to learn or absorb anything about the world around him.

One Saturday morning tweet last month encapsulates just how uninterested Trump is in acquiring new information:

@realDonaldTrump: Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They are also working with North Korea.Not much of an agreement we have! (10:59 PM · Sep 23, 2017)

As was widely reported (and easily confirmed), Trump’s tweet was completely false — no such test occurred — and based on old footage of an unsuccessful Iranian missile test from January.

As far as we know, this tweet was mostly inconsequential. No lives were lost, no wars were started, and no international incidents were provoked. But to accept that standard as an appropriate one for measuring a presidency is sad and dangerous — and misses the point.

No single individual in the United States has access to a greater volume and caliber of information to probe a passing hunch than the president of the United States. The office of the presidency offers its occupant on-demand access to America’s deepest and most classified secrets, as well as hundreds of qualified experts who will drop everything they’re doing to respond to the president’s questions. In the likes of Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, Trump has surrounded himself with three of the people most likely to ace a pop quiz from the president about Iranian missile launches — but only if they were quizzed before the president tweeted.

Trump’s predecessors didn’t suffer from the same incuriousness. While reading isn’t the only measure of intellectual curiosity, it’s often a telling one. Previous presidents of both parties have made time to read, arguing that it’s one of the few ways to stay in touch with the world outside the bubble of the office. Barack Obama read extensively throughout his presidency, believing reading to be an invaluable source of empathy, historical perspective, and understanding of the human condition. George W. Bush was also an avid reader, even averaging about two books a week throughout 2006.

Obama and Bush, like many presidents who came before them, shared a deep curiosity of history and of the world around them. Their successor doesn’t share that belief.

As Washington Post reporters Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish describe in Trump Revealed, Trump doesn’t read because he believes he doesn’t have time. In March, Trump was asked by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, “What do you do at the end of the day? What do you read, what do you watch?” Trump responded, in Palin-esque form, “Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book — I’m trying to get started. Every time I do about a half a page, I get a phone call that there’s some emergency, this or that.” He ultimately suggested he was reading a book on Andrew Jackson.

It’s true that the presidency is an all-consuming job, but by all accounts, Trump’s problem isn’t time, it’s prioritization — and his priority is television. More specifically, his priority — his obsession — is cable news coverage of himself and his administration. According to the Washington Post, “Trump turns on the television almost as soon as he wakes, then checks in periodically throughout the day in the small dining room off the Oval Office, and continues late into the evening when he’s back in his private residence.” He told TIME that TiVo “is one of the great inventions of all time.” One estimate suggests that Trump watches five hours of television a day.

By a number of measures, Trump’s self-imposed intellectual boundaries have served him well. The arrogance, self-righteousness, and boundless self-confidence of someone who says he doesn’t need to read “because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability” helped give him a life of wealth and celebrity — and get him elected president.

But the same incurious traits that made him a business mogul, reality star, and successful candidate also make him an ineffective and dangerous president. The same impulsiveness, pettiness, and indifference to human emotions that captivated millions of viewers of The Apprentice have undermined the world’s faith in the United States by alienating American allies, provoking adversaries, and bringing the the country dangerously close to a nuclear confrontation.

The same obsession with his portrayal in New York City tabloids has become an obsession with how cable news covers his administration, feeding his sense of victimhood, closing him off to competing sources of information, and prompting impulsive Twitter rants directed at perceived opponents and those who have failed to appreciate his accomplishments and sacrifice.

The same deep insecurities and thin skin that motivated Trump to aspire to build an empire also left him defensive, sensitive to slights, and demanding of pitiful obsequiousness from those who find it an opportunity and blessing to serve his agenda.

The same unpredictability, logical incoherence, “who me?” folksiness, and willingness to lie and contradict himself shamelessly that charmed investors, reporters, and business partners throughout his career offered plausible deniability to those who wished to disregard his long track record of stoking racial fear and resentment, one of the few activities to which he’s remained committed throughout his life.

The same obsession with revenge and score-settling that helped him rise in the cutthroat world of real estate has morphed into such a profound resentment of his predecessor that Trump’s infatuation with unraveling Obama’s legacy seems to guide nearly all of his decision making.

It’s difficult to accept the degree to which one person’s impulsiveness and intellectual indifference is guiding the direction of the most powerful nation on earth.

Because Trump is fundamentally incurious about something until it affects him directly, has his name in it, or is put directly in front of him, he seemed to see all Syrians as threats to American safety — until he saw pictures of victims of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons attacks. He seemed to think fixing the American health care system was easy, until he tried it himself and realized that “it’s an unbelievably complex subject” that no one knew could be so complicated. He seemed to believe no one knew the chair of the Federal Reserve was important — until he was tasked with picking the next one, when he learned that “It’s actually a very important decision [and] most people have no idea how important that position is.”

The fundamental disinterest in learning or experiencing anything other than what’s directly in front of him makes it almost impossible to do the thing that presidents are elected to do: make the most difficult decisions in government — the decisions that no one but the president can make. As Obama told writer Michael Lewis in a 2012 Vanity Fair profile, “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it.”

It doesn’t matter how Trump gets his intelligence briefings, but it matters whether he gets them at all — and who he shares them with. It doesn’t matter whether he watches television, but it matters when it’s five hours a day and is seemingly his only source of information. It doesn’t matter that he likes to feel appreciated, but it matters when his insatiable desire for praise and flattery makes him immune to disagreement and different opinions.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t exercise because he believes that “the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted,” but it matters when the person who holds those beliefs also controls the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t recognize an old Iranian missile launch on TV, but it matters that his response is impulsive tweeting, not information seeking.

The consequences of Trump’s incuriousness are real: he doesn’t know what bills he’s supporting, what policy commitments he’s making, or what implications his words and deeds have. He’s deeply susceptible to superficial appearances and prone to making decisions based not on the most compelling argument, but who happened to be the last person he spoke to, or who the president thinks “gets great ratings” on Morning Joe. (Daniel Drezner has compiled an impressive list of the hundred-plus times Trump aides have treated their boss like “like a toddler” in order to get him to do what they want.)

The world is a complicated place, and few jobs are as complicated as the presidency. But by every indication, Donald Trump sees none of that complexity. Even more unsettling, he appears to have no interest in trying to see the world as anything other than a reflection of himself.

When the ostensible leader of the free world is that incurious about the world he’s charged with leading — when he sets the bar for our collective expectations and aspirations that low — he doesn’t just risk conflict or catastrophe, but also the poisoning of a generation with apathy, cynicism, and resentment.

Trump’s flailing first ten months in office suggest that at least some intellectual curiosity is a prerequisite for a successful presidency. That alone should give us reason to aim higher next time.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘Extra Newsfeed.’