I have had a number of conversations with my grandchildren about the prefrontal cortex. It’s a neat little feature developed over several million or several hundred thousand years that’s there to keep us from doing dangerous, stupid, or socially unacceptable things. It’s not fully developed until a human is  in his or her twenties. It’s the reason that 18-year-olds usually make good soldiers and lousy strategists.

My conversations had varying degrees of effectiveness, but the older two arrived in their twenties intact, and all four of them are people I still enjoy spending time with, so it hasn’t been a waste.

Now comes Trump, someone who seems to have made it into his seventies without having grown a prefrontal cortex. He continues to do dangerous, stupid, and socially unacceptable things, even when surrounded by people who should know better.

This week, for instance, he declared that electing Joe Biden would “hurt God.” Who knew that the guy he calls “Sleepy Joe” and declares to be incapable of accomplishing anything could be so powerful as to hurt God? Actually, nobody with two brain cells to rub together. Trump has proved for many years that he’s incapable of constructing a logical sentence or creating a logical plan. Now, so far as I’m concerned, he’s insulting God.

However, that wasn’t the biggest violation of the “dangerous, stupid, and socially unacceptable” last week. That honor has to go to his statement that he would “defund Social Security” in his second term. He evidently missed the memo that showed that nearly a quarter of single senior citizens and nearly half of married seniors relied on Social Security for 90% or more of their income, and more than half of all seniors rely on it for more than half of their income. He’s willing to swap for another 7.65% corporate tax cut. True, individuals would get an equal amount, but they would be giving up both Social Security and Medicare, something that those who use those programs have learned to respect.

This is where the hole in Trump’s brain becomes really dangerous. Picture what will happen when our society arrives at a point where more than half of seniors have their income cut by more than half. For the moment, forget the individual suffering. Think about what it would do to the economy.

People who live primarily on Social Security spend all of their income, pushing more than $1 billion a year into the economy. On the other hand, the people who will benefit from the payroll tax cut don’t need to spend everything they have. They can afford the luxuries of investments (taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income) and savings accounts. They will continue to get richer. Except that the companies that they invest in will suffer from a smaller market (absent the $1 billion) and might lose both stock value and the ability to pay dividends.

However, that’s the economic argument. What I worry about are those who have struggled all of their lives, have arrived at the point where struggling is difficult or impossible, and need a safety net, as meager as it might be. My father, who had paid into Social Security from its beginning, had his first heart attack at 61. Since his job was very physical, he couldn’t work as he had for the previous 50 or so years. Social Security was a big help. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to enjoy it for long; he died three years later. But it helped when he needed it.

We are the only developed country in the world that ignores the needs of the needy while shoveling money to the very rich. I have nothing against the very rich. I always wanted to be rich. But I never wanted to be cruel, crass, and greedy. However, cruel, crass, and greedy seems to be public policy in these United States. It’s the “Leonard Cohen” approach to government: where “everybody knows” that the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. Cohen goes one to say: Everybody knows that the boat is leaking/Everybody knows that the captain lied./Everybody got this broken feeling/like their father or their dog just died.”

Cohen’s Everybody Knows sums it up as well as the dense pages of an economist’s analysis. Since Reagan, we’ve had a governmental structure that favored the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Twenty years ago, I was being interviewed by a seminary student, and he asked, “Do you believe that the poor will always be with us?”  I told him I did, but I thought it was poor public policy to create more of them. I still do. And our public policy still does.

If someone had given Donald Trump the prefrontal cortex counseling I gave my grandchildren, we might have avoided some of the more disastrous problems he’s caused. Considering the consequences might have prevented some of the following:

·       Elevating Kim on the world stage while accomplishing nothing, showing that we can be played by a funny-looking dictator.

·       Pulling out of the Climate Accords and the Iranian Nuclear Agreement, removing our efforts at dealing with climate change and our ability to supervise the nuclear efforts of Iran.

·      The wholesale rolling back of environmental regulations that were put in place to protect our air, our water, and our citizens.

·      Bullying the Fed into three rate reductions while he was touting the greatest economy in history, leaving us with fewer weapons to fight the economic slump caused by the pandemic.

·     Playing politics with a disease that has to this point killed 150,000 of our citizens and shows no sign of slowing down. (One of Trump’s most telling statements was that the people in his administration who actually knew something about the virus couldn’t testify before Congress because “they (Congress) don’t like me.”)

I think it’s too late to pray that Trump will grow a prefrontal cortex, but it’s not too late to prevent him from having another four years like his first four.

Pray for the Republic.