Ezra Klein makes the argument that what is wrong with Donald Trump is his complete lack of inhibition. It’s a long essay, and I encourage you to listen instead of read, because the audio clips interspersed are reliably jaw-dropping. Klein’s conclusion – that this disinhibition is incredibly dangerous because he’s planning on removing all the checks on his power – is spot on, and terrifying.
This bit really hit; emphasis mine.
Over the years, I have interviewed I don’t know how many politicians. Talking to them is different from talking to anyone else. It’s why I don’t just fill this show with them. Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.
The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.
But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear, if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?
It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isn’t his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It’s the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.