The subtext of Donald Trump’s reckless tweets is that he lacks judgement

The word is that Trump’s team are responsible for his daytime tweets, but that he takes his phone to bed, writes Terry Prone

I ONCE had a client who did midnight texts. They were urgent, those texts. They were important. They predicted problems. It was oddly flattering to be the recipient of this man’s last, worried thoughts, before he hit the scratcher. At dawn, I would respond to them, and because he never came back to me about them, I figured my expert advice had, in each case, solved the problem.

Big mistake. Huge. I discovered, one day, that I was a minor extra in the ‘Midnight Text’ production. The texts were pinging into the phones of dozens of us. It was only when a couple of us got together that we worked out that none of us was special. We were just names in his contact list. Nor, we realised, after a look-back, were the messages important. Rather, they were a form of self-expression, occasioned by a late-night bottle of wine. Some people, when you throw a few scoops into them, do karaoke. Some text. This man texted. The moving finger wrote, and having written, might as well not have bothered, because the missives disappeared in a matter of minutes, at least from the sender’s consciousness.

The rest of us might be running around worried about the issues raised, but the originator of our concerns seemed to experience a noctural memory wipe of pleasing completeness. We all learned to ignore him and he never seemed to mind. We weren’t that concerned about it, because when it peaked he was only six months off retirement, and none of us was going to leak the increasingly bizarre content of his messages to anybody else. Unlike US Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who shares his bizarre small-hours-of-the-morning observations with the world, as we saw last week, when he tweeted in the middle of the night about a former Miss Universe whose career he is single-handedly reviving.

The word is that Mr Trump’s team are responsible for his daytime tweets, but that he takes his phone to bed with him, and so his noturnal emissions are unmediated, uncontrolled, and uninfluenced. Nobody stands by his bed, reads what he’s about to unleash upon the world, and says “Get a grip”. Which argues that Mr Trump is missing out on the first competence that might be listed on the job specifications for a US president: Judgement. Judgement, simplistically expressed, is the capacity, when you’re in a hole of your own devising, to stop digging. The Donald lacks that capacity.

Of course, his obsessional attacks on the former Miss Universe may play well with his constituency, which seems to be largely made up of the kind of underemployed, white, disappointed males that he would never have occasion to meet in the normal course of his business. The opinion polls, on the other hand, suggest that alleging, without evidence, that the former Miss Universe might be the subject of a sex tape, while creative of headlines, is not attracting the floating voters he needs to bring into his tent.

The pay-off for him is poor, whereas it’s wonderful for Hillary Clinton, whose follow-up tweet went right to the heart of the doubts of those floaters, by asking what kind of person stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories.

For Donald Trump himself, it’s not so good. Or, as Pulitzer-prizewinning writer Michael D’Antonio, his latest biographer, put it: “There has always been this dangerous part of him that will go too far and do something that backfires. His worst impulses are self-defeating.”

The wonder of Donald Trump is his uniqueness, for which we are all grateful. Imagine if he had been identical twins. I mean, the Happy Pear [sic] are great lads altogether, and the twins on GoggleBox are doing nobody any harm, but TrumpX2? Pass the sal volatile.

His uniqueness adds up to a persona no decent scriptwriter would ever put in a TV drama, because they’d be laughed at for coming up with such a crazy character, although the wardrobe people might be thrilled by the prospect of having to do the hair.

What have always been his greatest strengths in media terms are precisely the traits that are beginning to do him in. One of those traits is a short attention span, not to say an active, even florid, case of ADHD. People who knew Trump during his first marriage say that he always found a way to exit social events held in his own home. He would arrive, be sociable for a few minutes, and then announce that he had an important meeting somewhere else.

His first ghost-writer found that even when he had the opportunity to talk about himself and his own philosophy, he ran out of steam so quickly that the ghost-writer had to invent thoughts, beliefs, and stories for him. In another ghosted book, he admitted having a short attention span, while claiming it as an advantageous characteristic worth emulation.

“Quite often,” the book has him confide, “I’ll be talking to someone and I’ll know what they’re going to say before they say it. After the first three words are out of their mouth, I can tell what the next 40 are going to be, so I try to pick up the pace and move it along. You can get more done, faster, that way.”

Of course you can. You can go bankrupt more often and more expeditiously. However, for the president of one of the world’s great powers, this short attention span might have a few drawbacks, already evident in Trump’s public communication. To appropriate a Bob Geldof usage, the fact is that Trump can’t be arsed to learn anything about the complexities of US foreign policy. Hell, he can’t be bothered to learn simple facts, like that America cannot build a wall right across its southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

The ADHD, combined with less-than-supportable self-belief, mixed with impulsivity, makes perfect sense in the world of reality TV. But in reality, it doesn’t work at all, as we saw in the first debate with Hillary Clinton. Trump interrupted her constantly. Of course, men, particularly powerful men, interrupt women a lot oftener than women interrupt men, but, during the debate, he interrupted Clinton in a way that hammers home the accuracy of D’Antonio’s observation: his interruptions were self-defeating.

A neophyte barrister knows you never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer, yet that was exactly what he did with Clinton, more than once handing her the hammer with which she nailed him.

The question, now, for the Trump team, is whether they can, before the next debate, control a man who takes pride in being uncontrollable and whether they can correct neurological patterns hard-wired into his brain. If they can’t, it’s all over.