The Foolhardy Presumed
The Ignorant Assumed

ELIZABETH GEORGE
June 19, 2026

For reasons involving my participation in what has become a sadly deteriorating relationship, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between assuming and presuming. I’ve written about both in my daily journal, and I’ve spent some time dwelling on the possible outcomes when someone engages in either activity. It was, therefore, not an enormous leap to consider both assuming and presuming in light of the second coming of Donald Trump into the Presidency of our country.

A great deal of naiveté went into the first election of Donald Trump in 2016. Post Trump’s ride down the golden escalator and his declaration of candidacy in 2015, I can remember sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table at a dear friend’s house during which her grandson said to her, “Sorry, Gram, but Trump’s the man,” knowing that she was a liberal Democrat. He had no real information about Trump, as it turned out. He had merely watched a number of seasons of “The Apprentice” in which Trump played the part of a billionaire business mogul. Trump was not, of course. He had a history of bankruptcies, failed business deals, mismanaged casinos, and unpaid debtors littering his past. But he was someone known by the creators of “The Apprentice”, his face was recognizable to the public, and he had been commenting on everything from politics to beefsteaks for years. And that’s what the creators needed: a known quantity. Obviously, a real business mogul probably wasn’t going to have the time or the interest in appearing on a weekly television elimination game show. But Trump had the time and he liked attention, so for a period of years he played the part required of him. He wasn’t an actor, but he didn’t need to be. He just needed to pretend that he was successful.

Like my friend’s grandson, a good many people believed that the fictional character Trump was playing was a real business giant. After all, he had name recognition in the form of hotels, golf courses, a university (later deemed to be fraudulent), and any number of products he hawked from time to time. Name recognition gave him a leg up on the political competition.

Additionally, he had garnered a great deal of attention by creating a controversy about the birthplace of the sitting President: Barack Obama, claiming again and again that Obama had been born in Kenya. He had no proof to offer, but that was not the point. Undermining the President was the point, although the reason for his doing this did not make itself clear until later.

To succeed in his quest for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump made numerous declarations about what he intended to do if elected: put an end to the influx of rapists, murderers, and drug dealers flooding from Mexico into the country; build a wall along the nearly 2,000 mile border with Mexico that Mexico would pay for; repeal Obamacare (AKA The Affordable Care Act); “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special interests; invest heavily in roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure; establish term limits in Congress; cut taxes. He had no record of public service to fall back upon and to use as illustrations of promises made and promises kept, so it was left to him to persuade the public into a belief that his intentions were reasonable and achievable.

To do this, he first needed to garner the attention of the public, however, since riding down a golden escalator with his wife in tow would not remain in the news cycle for any significant period of time. In this age of instant information, what he quickly realized was what Oscar Wilde had concluded 125 years earlier in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” He knew that he had to maintain the media’s focus on Donald Trump. Just being Donald Trump would not do that. But being Donald Trump and deriding people, assigning degrading nicknames to people, mimicking people’s mannerisms or afflictions or disabilities…all of these proved to be wildly effective in keeping him in the public eye.

In his first run for the Presidency, his daily outrages appealed to those who wanted to “stick it in the eye of the man.” Long ignored by politicians who promised them relief and gave them nothing, they were angry for legitimate reasons, they needed someone to blame, and in Donald Trump they assumed they had their champion at last. That assumption was what Trump was counting upon: their belief without proof that he was going to rid the country of people who were to blame for everything from the death of coalmining to everyday job losses to generational poverty. They believed he was going to make their lives better and give to them the future that they felt slipping more and more out of their grasp.

People like my friend’s grandson (who, thank God was not old enough to vote) presumed that Trump would do exactly what he said he was going to do. They presumed that he would be successful based on how he presented himself on television. If he was truly that business mogul they were watching weekly, there was a strong likelihood—in the minds of this group of voters—that the future he envisioned for America would come to pass. They had no actual proof of this, but proof is not required with presumption, and what is required to quash presumption is evidence to the contrary, and that was not forthcoming in 2015 or 2016.

When Trump declared the 2020 election fraudulent, those people who had chosen him as their leader in 2015-16 were primed to assume his words were true. They had not required proof of his acumen, his intelligence, or his talents in prior to the 2016 election, so there was no reason for them to require proof now. On the assumption that the election had been fixed and that Donald Trump had been robbed of his rightful second term, they flooded Washington DC on January 6, 2021, with the intention of acquiring for him that which was already his. Their assumption was needed for this: a belief that the election had been stolen from him without proof of this actually being a fact.

I admit to being astonished when Donald Trump was nominated for the Presidency a second time. At that point, he had been charged with 37 felonies, he had been convicted of 34 felonies, he’d lost a defamation case against a woman he called a liar for having declared he’d assaulted her in a department store, he’d paid hush-money to a porn star, his close association with a sexual predator had been revealed, he’d altered the Supreme Court’s make-up to eliminate women’s reproductive rights, he’d removed hundreds of classified documents from Washington DC to a bathroom in his Mar-a-Lago mansion-cum-club, he’d fired the deputy director of the FBI the day before he was due to retire and receive his pension, he’d been impeached twice, he fired the director of the FBI in the midst of an investigation into connections between his campaign staffers, his sons, and Russia. To me he was—and still is, I admit—both repulsive and repugnant. We were, I thought, well rid of him when he lost the election of 2020.

In 2024, there could be neither assumption nor presumption about Donald Trump among the voters. There was proof aplenty of what could be expected of a Trump presidency should he be elected once again. On one hand, in 2016, no matter what one thought of them personally, Trump had appointed a number of qualified people to serve in his cabinet. It was therefore logical for his voters to believe that he would do the same should he be elected once again. On the other hand, the manner in which he had turned the clock back on the position of women in American society was very disturbing. In this case, there was nothing to indicate that the position of women would improve were he once again the President. So people were faced with any number of facts, a previous four year term to examine, and a choice between a woman of color and a man well known at that point, both to the country and the world.

Behind the scenes, of course, there were players at work as there usually are in politics. The difference among the players this time round was that most of them were billionaires.

Additionally, however, an assumption rose among Evangelical Christians, bolstered by what they heard from the pulpit: Donald Trump had been sent by God. There could be, of course, no proof of this as no one had a direct line to the Almighty. Indeed, there wasn’t even a likelihood of there ever being proof of this, which meant there could be no presumption that Trump’s reappearance on the political scene was divinely inspired or divinely demanded. I admit to being utterly mystified by the Evangelicals’ embracing of Trump. There is nothing in his past or present behavior and nothing in his words to indicate an understanding of or an adherence to any part of Christian doctrine. But none of that was necessary once the assumption was made that Donald Trump was in possession of qualities heretofore only seen in the man from Nazareth.

With regard to the second election of Donald Trump, it would be easy to say “People are stupid,” especially since Donald Trump has openly declared that he “loves stupid people.” He’s spent most of his adulthood relying on people assuming he is who he says he is and who television producers say he is. Given evidence to the contrary, these same people presume that somewhere there is also evidence forthcoming that will prove beyond doubt that he has been maligned by detractors and falsely accused of crimes by those who envy his riches and his success.

At the end of the day, the most essential—and troubling—part of believing in someone without proof of his worthiness is its absolute ease. No intellectual work is required. Not much thought is required either.

It’s far more difficult to look clearly at an individual, to evaluate that person from a position of knowledge, and then to do something about it.

We can look at the man now, we can honestly assess his Presidency, we can decide if he speaks for America and holds the well-being of its citizens close to his heart. For some of us, the understanding of who the man is was planted in our brains on the day of the golden escalator ride. For others it has developed slowly. But we are all capable of seeking the truth as long as what we’re seeking is not merely confirmation of a set of beliefs that have no basis in reality.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104