This just in...

Regarding Federal Reserve decision to raise interest rates:“They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Regarding scientific findings on climate change: “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. 

You look at our air and our water, 

and it’s right now at a record clean.”

This just in from the House Intelligence Oversight Committee:

We know for the past two or three years, or possibly the last 20 or 30 years, people—some people—but definitely real people, have been asking to see Donald Trump’s tax returns. We would all like to know where and whom he’s gotten his money from, how he’s managed to survive so many bankruptcies, and how many women he has paid off to keep his affairs out of the news. We’d like to know whether he is a billionaire or billowing cauldron of hot air.

We’d certainly like to know these things.

However, after listening to him talk for a year on the campaign trail, being exposed to two years of non-coherent rambling coming out of the Oval Office, and being subjected to nonsensical tweets that appear to be written by someone taking an ESL course, our committee has decided there is something more important for Americans to know.

For this reason, we, on the House Intelligence Oversight Committee, have contacted Kew-Forest Elementary and New York Military Academy and subpoenaed Trump’s I.Q. tests results.

He should not be allowed to talk to one more foreign leaders—either publically or privately, or enact one more questionable policy decision snatched out of thin air after fermenting in that vat he calls his brain, albeit for 30 years or 30 seconds, until Americans know if their president possesses the basic intelligence needed to make high level decisions.

We don’t need a psychiatrist’s report to know if he’s crazy. We don’t need a quack doctor telling us he’s the healthiest president ever. We certainly know those around him lie as much as he does. We don’t need close friends or associates telling us he’s really a funny guy who’s simply getting a bad rap. We know for a fact that any rap he gets is a rap well deserved.

We do have to know, once and for all and beyond any reason of doubt, whether the president is an idiot, because we know what damage idiot leaders have done in the past.

Furthermore, it comes down to more than agreeing he acts like an idiot. Behaving like an idiot is every man’s right in a free country that guarantees the right to happiness, just as being able to vote for a man who behaves like an idiot is also a guaranteed right.

Maybe our founding fathers were too generous.

Nevertheless, behaving like an idiot and being an idiot are two different things.

A person who is not an idiot, but merely behaving like one, can shape up. He can wake up one morning, shake the cobwebs out of his head, and declare, enough is enough. I’m going to stop acting like a jerk. For a person who is not an idiot, this is a reasonable expectation. People turn their lives around all the time.

Let’s be honest. This is what we have all been hoping for. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen, but it usually doesn’t.

Kids do it as part of the natural maturing process. They stop the name-calling, constant fighting, pushing and shoving. They become more responsible and less erratic. In short, they grow up. They can do this because they are not idiots.

Idiots don’t grow up. Their intelligence limitations keep them frozen in time—forever young, but unfortunately forever incapable of functioning in a grown-up world.

We don’t know what the case is with Trump. He could be someone simply pretending to be an idiot—and it would take a super smart person to explain why anyone would do this, or he could be an idiot. No one knows, but anyone who is not an idiot should want to know.

Trump often points to his brain and tells us what a smart man he is. This isn’t something we absolutely cannot take his word for.

We don’t believe him when he tells us how rich he and what a smart businessman he is because we know about the bankruptcies, business failures, and inability to get a loan from anyone other than Russian oligarchs.

We don’t believe him when he tells us he’s not a racist because he continues to spout racist comments, enact racist policies, and—to his great chagrin—racists seem to love him.

We don’t believe him when he tells us he’s not a misogynist because we have heard him so many times bragging about being a misogynist.

We can’t go on believing what he tells us about his “great brain” when we have seen so much that tells us just the opposite. We don’t know if he is really an idiot or whether it is all an act to make him more appealing—and someone, someday will have to explain to me how that works.

We don’t need to talk to him. That would tell us nothing because we know listening to him for the last forty years has told us nothing.

We need to see those I.Q. test scores.

After that, we can look at his financial records.

After that, there might be a lot of his own associates questioning their own intelligence.

One final point. We all have guts and we all have brains. Wise men, using their brains, understand that guts should only be used to digest their food. Trump is right about one thing. Nobody else's brain can ever tell him anything.

The Laziest Man in America —getting under my skin

DURING THE 2016 campaign, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of having no stamina and Jeb Bush no energy. How ironic, coming from Donald Trump—the laziest man in America.

Being in your 70s and being lazy is no crime. There are lots of 70-year olds, who are kicking back, watching a little more TV than they should be. As the saying goes, “They earned it.” For the record, say what you want about Hillary, but I don’t think she has ever been lazy or lacked stamina, but this isn’t about her.

The thing about Trump is, he’s been lazy all his life.

Many will take issue with that assumption. How can he be lazy? The man is everywhere. He’s into everything. He barely sleeps. If nothing else, his twitter thumb is working around the clock.

One can be busy and still be lazy. In fact, being busy might be a sign of laziness—if nothing else, at least intellectually laziness.

An intellectually lazy person like Trump doesn’t take the time to think things through. He won’t make the effort because he doesn’t think the effort is necessary.

I can’t prove it, but I honestly think he came up with the idea for the wall during that famous ride down the escalator. He looked at the crowd on either side and saw how well protected he was from them. After all, he’s no Bobby Kennedy, mixing it up, shaking hands, patting supporters on the shoulder. He likes to keep his supporters at a distance. The closest he gets to them is his name on the sign they’re carrying. Walls are one way of achieving the separation he relishes.

Trump doesn’t read because that is only getting someone else’s thoughts. Likewise, he doesn’t need briefings. He hardly needs a staff. He’s got ideas popping into his head every minute, and a device in his hand to get those ideas out there.

Trump’s first instinct is to always trust his first instinct because in his gut, he knows that instinct is right.

If that instinct were right, he’d have a valid point, but it’s wrong, so he doesn’t. What he does have is a case of laziness.

He goes for easy answers to difficult or sometimes non-existent problems because it reinforces his brand—that he’s a strong and decisive businessman. On a side note, I think making money through branding is probably the laziest way to make money.

Here is the president, in his own words, acting off the top of his head—posing the problem and arriving at his solution.

“All Mexicans are rapists and murderers.” “We will build a wall and Mexico will pay for it.”

“I think Islam hates us.” “We must have a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

“Football players kneeling during the anthem are unpatriotic.” “Fire the sons of bitches.”

“Democrats are un-America and treasonous...and don’t love our country.” He insults them, belittles them, blames them and demands we vote them out.

“Journalists are the enemy of the people,” He says. Refers to ‘Fake News’ more than any other term, except maybe “no collusion,” securing his position alongside past dictators like Stalin and Hitler and current ones like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

Where there are real issues like Russia interfering in our elections, he doesn’t see them. “Putin says he didn’t do it and I believe him.” “Mueller’s investigation is a witch hunt, a hoax.”

When his staff puts loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to him, he shames and bullies them, calling them names you’d expect to hear in a playground from a five-year old.

When they put loyalty to him over loyalty to the Constitution, they are pretty much given a green light to do anything they want—separate children from their parents, find their wives jobs, or just run the country into the ground.

These are the instincts of an intellectually lazy man. A man who has never met a perceived problem that didn’t catch his fancy—or an easy solution, he couldn’t latch onto and stick with as if bound with super-glue.

He lives in a world where everything we thought was true is false, where friends become enemies and foes become new best friends. Putin is a strong leader, not a dictator. Kim Jong-un is a funny and honorable man, but Trudeau is dishonest and weak.

His lack of substance and unmatched shallowness feeds the national nightmare of a nation divided. His flights of fancy are met by citizen’s fits of fury and 200 years of at least a charade of mutual respect morphs into twitter wars, which solve nothing, but sure do make everyone mad—except him.

For the last three years we’ve listened to our frustrated Congressmen and Senators publicly offer tired prayers that Trump will mature, do the right thing, grow into the office; that he will get serious by getting down to serious work. Where Obama’s iconic “Hope” poster became a symbol of change, Republicans only hope is that he changes before he screws up.

Newsflash: 70-year-old men don’t suddenly see the error of their ways—especially when those ways have worked out so well, even leading to the presidency?

I’ll tell you what 70-year-old men can do. They can remember Louie Prima.

The country’s relationship with Trump reminds me of the Louie Prima/Keely Smith duet. She, foreshadowing our current political climate, sang, “I got it bad, and that ain’t good,” and Louie, as the voice of the laziest president in history, responds, “I got it good and that ain’t bad,” before quickly adding, “I ain’t gonna change.”

This essay appears in my recent "Trump Dismantles Washington"