'Borderline illiterate': Trump mocked as he 'runs his mouth' instead of running the country

President Donald Trump, says columnist Kevin Williamson, “doesn’t run the country. He runs his mouth.”

Williamson described Trump to The Dispatch as a “borderline illiterate” who "has chosen a strange strategy as president: being a writer” of “memos and tweets and presidential statements.”

“I mean that he is a writer of these in the same way he is the writer who wrote 'The Art of the Deal'—which is to say, he didn’t write the thing, but it is, in a broader sense, his work. And the thing about work is, Trump does not like it.”

READ MORE: Inside MAGA's real motive for trying to destroy America

But post-election politics and real policymaking requires “boring, labor-intensive, grinding work,” and Trump is no worker like Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, who “dragg[ed] the GOP out of its isolationist bunker in the face of World War II.”

“Trump doesn’t really do politics—because he is, in fact, utterly incompetent at negotiation, which is why he spends so much time insisting that he is a master of the art,” said the right-wing political commentator.

Trump’s “low-energy autocracy” consists of “lots of easy-to-publish executive orders amounting in the long run to approximately squat,” unlike more durable reform through actual legislation. He is a “signaler” who promises big things, however “[t]here’s no mechanism for making anything happen. And so nothing is going to happen.”

In this way Trump differs from a seasoned autocrat like Lenin, says Williamson. “Lenin was a monster, but he also was a world-shaper. Trump is a monster and a social-media troll … He is not a driver of world events but a commentator on them.”

READ MORE: Even Trump’s lapdog is terrified now.

Still, Trump would “like you to believe he is in the thick of it, which is why, for example, he falsely claimed to have had a hand in the India-Pakistan ceasefire, which was news in Delhi and Islamabad. … That’s the first rule of rainmaking: When it rains, start dancing.”

Of course signaling can impact things like the world market, he adds. "Tell the markets you intend to follow a daffy economic policy of chaotic quasi-autarky and they just may take you seriously enough to crash," but it more regularly only matters "when it is backed by something stronger than the signal itself.”

Read the full Dispatch report here.