I was enjoying a perfectly adequate, albeit slightly presumptuous, 2015 Sancerre on the terrace at Mar-a-Lago last weekend when I witnessed a moment of pure, unadulterated executive brilliance. President Donald Trump, now a robust 80 years old, walked purposefully toward a decorative potted ficus, extended his hand, and spent an estimated forty-five seconds inquiring about the Canadian timber industry under the apparent impression he was speaking to Prime Minister Mark Carney. The mainstream press, trapped in their pedantic little obsession with cognitive baselines, would have you believe this is a sign of decline. But as I watched the President nod thoughtfully at a cluster of broadleaf foliage, I realized something profound: we are demanding the wrong kind of coherence from the leader of the free world.
For too long, the American electorate has been shackled to the exhausting, middle-class expectation that a president should know exactly where he is, who he is speaking to, and what decade it is. This is the mindset of a shift worker. It is the anxiety of a middle manager who lives in terror of missing a key performance indicator. But when you operate at the absolute pinnacle of global power, or, frankly, when you manage a mid-sized private equity portfolio as I do, you understand that a rigid attachment to linear reality is actually a profound liability.
The working class, bless their hearts, simply cannot grasp this. I recently found myself in a conversation with a laid-off manufacturing worker, though technically he was driving my town car to Teterboro, but the socioeconomic exchange was the same. He expressed a pedestrian concern that the President of the United States recently trailed off during a speech about inflation to spend twelve minutes discussing whether he would rather be electrocuted by a boat battery or eaten by a shark. The driver felt this indicated a lack of focus on his impending eviction. I had to patiently explain to him, while adjusting the climate control from the backseat, that his demand for a president who stays perfectly on-topic is a symptom of his own lack of diversified assets. If your entire livelihood depends on the government passing coherent policy, the problem is not the President's age. The problem is your portfolio.
We must contextualize the spectacle of Trump at 80 within the broader tapestry of our 250-year-old republic. America is not a young, scrappy startup anymore. We are a legacy institution. We are tired. We have a staggering amount of sovereign debt, a hopelessly bloated military apparatus, and a deep, structural, bipartisan desire to just sit in a comfortable leather chair and yell at the television until someone brings us a cheeseburger. Why should our head of state project a false, exhausting vitality? An octogenarian who occasionally wanders away from foreign dignitaries to inspect a chandelier is the most honest avatar this nation has ever had. He is the physical embodiment of the American century entering its twilight, demanding a Diet Coke, and refusing to read the briefing materials. It is, in a word, majestic.
Consider the geopolitical advantages of cognitive fluidity. I recently shared a plate of remarkably dry canapés with a European central banker at Davos. He confessed that the entire continent is paralyzed by the current administration. When dealing with a leader who follows a rigid ideological framework, foreign adversaries can plan. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are playing a highly structured game of geopolitical chess. But how do you play chess against a man who might flip the board, might try to eat the rook, or might simply walk out of the room because he thinks he saw a famous golfer from the 1980s in the hallway?
You cannot deter a man who has forgotten you exist. This is the ultimate strategic upper hand.
What the coastal elites call 'losing his train of thought mid-sentence' is actually the President deploying a sophisticated, non-linear disruption tactic that keeps our adversaries constantly off-balance.
Exactly. When President Trump recently praised the late, great Hannibal Lecter during a bilateral trade summit with French President Emmanuel Macron, the media shrieked about mental acuity. But I saw the look in Macron's eyes. It was sheer, unadulterated terror. Macron spent the next three days having his intelligence agencies try to figure out if the United States was threatening to consume the French delegation with a nice Chianti, or if the President had simply seen a television commercial for a psychological thriller prior to walking out onto the dais. We extracted unprecedented concessions on digital taxation and agricultural subsidies simply because nobody in the Élysée Palace wanted to press the issue and find out what the President was actually talking about. This is the kind of leverage that a coherent, 50-something Ivy League graduate could never achieve.
Furthermore, there is a profound deregulatory benefit to a president who simply cannot be bothered to remember the names of his own cabinet agencies. For decades, conservatives have promised to dismantle the administrative state. But it turns out the most effective way to shrink the federal government is not through complex legislative maneuvering. It is by electing an 80-year-old who routinely forgets to appoint undersecretaries because he is busy relitigating a golf tournament from 1994. The bureaucracy is withering on the vine, starved of executive attention, and the markets have never been happier.
The progressive left, naturally, is terrified of this dynamic. They cling to the archaic notion that a head of state should be able to walk down a gentle ramp without the concentrated focus of a tightrope walker. They demand stamina and energy, entirely missing the point that exertion is a sign of lower-class labor. Wealthy people do not exert themselves. Powerful people do not hurry. The fact that the President requires a golf cart to traverse a distance of fifty feet is not a medical concern; it is a profound display of status. I myself have not walked under my own power through an airport terminal since the late nineties, and nobody questions my ability to direct capital flows.
I have implemented a similar strategy in my own corporate life. I currently serve on the boards of four different multinational conglomerates. Do I know what any of them actually produce? Of course not. If I spent my days concerning myself with the minutiae of supply chains or employee retention, I would have no time for the macro-level vision boarding that justifies my exorbitant compensation package. I delegate the reality to people who are paid to care about reality. The President is merely doing the same on a sovereign scale.
So the next time you see Donald Trump approach a microphone, stare blankly into the middle distance for a full forty seconds, and then launch into a disjointed monologue about water pressure in luxury dishwashers, I urge you to resist the pedestrian urge to worry. Do not ask what the policy is. Do not ask if the man with the nuclear codes knows what day of the week it is.
Instead, pour yourself a glass of something expensive, look out over the sprawling, 250-year-old republic that has been engineered entirely for your comfort, and appreciate the performance art. We have finally achieved a post-competence presidency, and frankly, I have never slept better.