Trump is a dangerous president because he lacks this crucial skill

---

The president lacks the basic ability to think critically

---

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I’ve come up with a definitive reason that Donald Trump is quite possibly the worst person to have serving as president of the United States — he lacks a critical mind.

That isn’t to say that Donald Trump lacks opinions. He has plenty of them, visible to the world of social media through his tweets (whether we want them or not). But his opinions are rarely the result of his own thought processes. Rather, they come from other places, usually cable news programs he’s just watched or far-right wing internet websites with questionable sources for their content.

Critical thinking is defined as “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.” We had a president with a critical mind when Barack Obama was in office. To be sure, he took advice from several of his close advisers, and had his own “presidential bubble.”

But Obama was an enlightened mind also, and weighed each person’s opinions against the evidence at hand, formulating a carefully thought-out opinion based on the ideas of several individuals and, most importantly, his own thinking. He acted coolly and calmly, never making a brash decision without first going over what the possible outcomes could be.

We don’t have that careful, measured analysis in President Trump. The current commander-in-chief throws out wild accusations without evidence, and relies too heavily on what information is being spoon-fed to him rather than taking stock from several different sources of information and coming up with his own decisions.

That allows for many mistakes to be made — and for many to manipulate the decision-making process of the president to reach their desired outcomes. That makes Trump’s presidency potentially the most dangerous one in recent history, and it’s why we need to stand up to him at every juncture possible.

---