The Chimp Theory

The other day, I was listening to the Ezra Kline podcast. They were discussing the invasion of Venezuela, of course, and a substantial portion of the episode was dedicated to answering one question: Why?

The official reason the administration gave—at first—was Maduro is guilty of trafficking drugs. OK, maybe, that’s true. But Venezeula trafficks cocaine, which is not the drug Trump has been flapping his saggy gullet about. We didn’t even have time to have this full thought when an alternative explanation surfaced: it’s for the oil!! We’re gonna drill all the oil! But, wait a minute…apparently Venezeula only produces 1% of the world’s oil? And it will be extremely expensive to modernize the equipment? And we actually already have enough oil to sustain ourselves if we really needed to? Again, an explanation that almost makes sense at first, but the more you dissect it, the more holes appear and the less convincing it becomes.

What I find frustrating about this type of analysis is it starts from an assumption that I believe has never held up when it comes to Trump: that his decisions make any sense at all. Like, have you heard Trump speak about anything? When he’s explaining his reasoning, what comes out is at best a loosely knit series of non-facts about topics that hopefully have some tangential relationship to what he’s trying to explain. To call him stupid would be too reductive. A stupid person would be too smart to make themselves look so stupid by turning every answer into a tirade about how he’s actually the smartest most best person in the world and how evil and stupid Joe Biden is. What’s so remarkable about Trump is not that he’s stupid, a narcissist, misanthropic, or impulsive—it’s that I have it on good evidence he does not have a human brain.

Think about it through the lens of the trendy story Frankenstein. Imagine you wanted to create the perfect hateable rich dude from scratch. You might start with the body of some old dead white man. You’d probably make him fat, give him hair that looks like a toupee, a spray tan so terrible it becomes a famous look among his braindead supporters. To top it all off, you might pull the great prank of all: replace the human brain with a chimpanzee brain.

Ah, yes, your neurons are all connecting up now. Chimps do in fact have more in common with Trump than Trump does with humans. Chimps, too, have a small vocabulary. They love boom boom punchy time to kill all the baddies. And, of course Trump’s favorite, they are among the most adept species at flinging shit.

So the next time you hear the guy speak, just think: Honestly, he’s doing pretty good for a monkey*.

*Yes I know chimps are apes, shut up poindexter