“The mass-man has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh.” – Jose Ortega y’Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930)
For the most part, criticisms of Donald J. Trump focus on issues of politics, law and integrity. Nonetheless, regarding an American president endowed with near-total decisional authority over nuclear weapons,[1] a more fundamental concern should be Trump’s well-documented incapacity for logic-based reasoning. Though often minimized, underestimated or overlooked, this conspicuous deficit could lead the United States not “only” to mounting legal debilities (e.g., grievous violations of the law of war), but to unprecedented military conflicts.[2]
The next question is plain: What should be done to avoid such intolerable outcomes? Already, each day’s news is replete with credible condemnations of Mr. Trump’s logical failings, historical inaccuracies and contrived conclusions. In more elevated parlance, this problem concerns what capable scientists and philosophers would call a failing “paradigm.”[3]
There are clarifying details. It’s time to get beyond variously partisan and piecemeal condemnations. This president’s demonstrated intellectual incapacities reflect more than “just” a deficiency of learning. They express the direct result of self-inflicted analytic derangements.
Understood as explanatory metaphor and parable, it’s no longer enough to point out that the American “emperor” is “naked.” It also needs to be acknowledged that Donald Trump wants to be visibly anti-intellectual. In his own words, it’s always better to have the right “attitude” – a narrowly visceral expectation – than to make promising policy “preparations.”
Pertinent examples abound, most notably Trump’s first-term failure to control North Korean nuclear proliferation, his incessantly incoherent tariff wars and (above all else) his fawning allegiance to Vladimir Putin.[4] Paradoxically, Trump’s “peace” for Ukraine calls for that victim country’s self-annihilation. As for Israel, Trump’s neatly-delineated “peace” rests on (1) an “international stabilization force” comprised of Israel’s implacable enemies; and (2) a willfully blind-eye to Hamas rearmaments[5] and complementary jihadi enhancements in Syria, Yemen, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey.
There is more. This American president takes great pride in the Abraham Accords, so-called “peace” agreements with countries that have never really been at war with Israel. Few Israelis will sleep better at night knowing they will not be attacked by Morocco, Bahrain, UAE or Sudan. Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”
Elementary common sense dictates that Trump’s foreign policy “accomplishments” have been constructed ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” On both security and economic matters, this US president’s defense of ad hoc policy-making displays a basic fallacy. Known by logicians and scientists asthe post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, or simply “post hoc,“ the inherently false argument insists that because a first event is followed by a second, the latter is a necessary result of the first. As a timely example, Trump blames Russian aggression in Ukraine (which he wrongly calls a “war”) and American “affordability” problems on his predecessor.
Still, truth is always exculpatory. Even science-dismissing Trump loyalists should acknowledge that any post hoc argument is fallacious on its face, especially when it discounts or undervalues other relevant explanations. In contrast to his argument on “affordability,” which places all economic blame on Joe Biden, Trump’s demand for stock-market performance credit ignores Biden contributions altogether.
Another willful Trump manipulation of elementary logic concerns his relentless association of brute force with strategic truth. Known to formal logic as the argumentum ad baculum (“illegitimate appeal to force”), this fallacy is committed by Trump whenever he substitutes coercive threats for disciplined reasoning. Accordingly, intellectually honest analysts ought now to bring to mind this president’s latest dealings with Venezuela and his earliest relations with North Korea. The second example points to a time before the 2018 Singapore Summit; that is, before Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un “fell in love.”
In the arena of global geopolitics, a perpetually bewildering theater in which North Korea is already nuclear and Iran’s nuclear potential is anything but “obliterated,” the US president seeks to persuade adversaries (present and potential) with crudely indiscriminate threats of punishment. Why should such all-or-nothing deterrent threats be unconvincing as well as unlawful? Among other plausible answers, this president has never even bothered to learn that threat credibility and threat destructiveness can sometimes vary inversely.
US strategic deterrence must be based on a continuous range of credible retaliations, a spectrum of flexible and nuanced reprisals. To date, in the midst of steadily-expanding US security policy incoherence, President Donald Trump has never calibrated specific American reprisals to particular enemy aggressions. In the Middle East, Trump’s shallow approach to Hamas/jihadi aggressions can never safeguard Israel. At best, his childlike “Board of Peace” is diplomatic self-parody.
There is more. An especially worrisome fallacy of Trump reasoning is the argumentum ad hominem. In this clear example of intellectual error, the American president tries to support his declarations of the moment by discrediting a presumed opponent for personal (and hence extraneous) reasons. To wit, seemingly unsympathetic politicians and unflattering news reporters are cheerfully reduced by Donald Trump to “horrible person” or “stupid person” status.
A corrosive “flipside” of argumentum ad hominem is President Trump’s escalating elevations of illegitimate subject-matter authorities. Known widely as a devious technique of commercial advertising, these fallacious arguments intend to transfer the respect or reverence one may have for a particular authority from one subject domain to another. In such always-illogical transfers, the recipient or “transferee” has no relevant expertise or pertinent credentials.
The above-referenced fallacies represent only the most obvious Trump offenses against correct reasoning. Across the board, there have been many egregious Trump manipulations of logic, including his identification with the audience deception ( “I eat fast food like you” and “I will always tell it like it is.”); flattery (“I’m so happy to be in the great state of______”); condemnation (“I’m so unhappy to visit a state that is really just a `den of thieves.'”); alarm (“We now face the greatest threat to America ever……and only I can fix it.”); appeal to emotion (“You, my friends, have been neglected for too long; when I make American great again, you real Americans will be made great again.”); and symmetrical responsibility (“Many sides are responsible for the rioting and violence in Charlottesville….There were many fine people on both sides.”)
Summing up, it’s high time for Americans to worry not only about their current president’s transgressions (both moral and legal), but also his intellectual debilities. At some not yet determinable point, Donald Trump’s shortfalls of logic-based reasoning could bring us to the brink of a nuclear war.[6] Thinking about the new movie (A House of Dynamite, 2025), continued American governance by a man who “learns only in his own flesh” – philosopher Ortega y ‘Gasset’s “mass man” – could confer final nuclear authority to Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. Prima facie, such a defiling triumvirate would not “merely” undermine US Founding Father intentions for a reason-based American Republic. It would simultaneously present a coinciding threat to national and global survival.
[1]See by this author, at Modern Diplomacy, Louis René Beres: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/01/23/reconsidering-nuclear-command-authority-americas-most-urgent-obligation/ See earlier, by Professor Beres, at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2016): https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/#post-heading
[2] See also, by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Modern Diplomacy: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/03/15/the-final-mercy-of-magicians-america-donald-trump-and-nuclear-war/
[3] This term has its origins in a modern classic by Princeton Professor Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (The University of Chicago Press, 1962). I (Professor Beres) had the good fortune to listen to Professor Kuhn’s pertinent lectures back at Princeton in the late 1960s.
[4] See by this writer, Professor Louis René Beres, at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2025/08/why-a-russia-ukraine-territory-swap-would-violate-us-and-international-law/
[5] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at The Jerusalem Post (December 2025): https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-879864
[6] Professor Louis René Beres is the author of some early major books dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (The University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (D.C. Heath/Lexington Books, 1986). In 2003-2004, Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (Iranian nuclear weapons) for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
