The thinking segment of the American population, myself included, continues to wonder, often involuntarily, what forces could produce a person as unworthy as Donald Trump and then elect him to the most powerful political leadership position on earth. With each passing day, the conundrum grows as his conduct becomes even more horrific and dishonest than the day before than the day before ….

The principle of Occam’s Razor says, in its simplest form, that of two alternative explanations for something, it is usually the simpler one that is correct. More accurately, it is Ockham’s razor, named after a philosopher whose adulthood was spent in the 14th Century. The concept has other names, such as the law of economy.

In any case, if you apply that principle, Donald Trump is easy to understand.

Trump is a rich, over-privileged man who has always had his way by bullying, threatening and lying, using his wealth (handed to him by Daddy & later ill-gotten) to file lawsuits, abuse the bankruptcy laws to thwart paying off creditors and generally demanding and getting whatever he wanted. He is accustomed to being catered to by employees desperate to keep their jobs even at the expense of their dignity and by women seeking the “benefits” of being around a rich guy who lavished them with gifts in return from whatever they were willing to provide, including, most recently, their silence so that his campaign to be president would not face the inconvenience of revealed extramarital affairs.

Now, most people in Trump’s shoes conduct their perfidy in private, because obscurity serves to protect them from exposure for the type of people they really are. The recent spate of disclosures in the #metoo movement show how that has worked in the past. Hopefully, no more. But Trump has never shied away from public display of his crassness, witness his gold apartment in New York, or making excuses for his numerous business failures. He simply lies about them, denies everything and moves on to the next misadventure funded by his money and other people’s money who were foolish enough to ignore the evidence of his incompetence.

Trump is the perfect example, I suggest, of the Occam’s razor principle, which is exemplified perfectly in a quotation attributed to Coco Chanel: “There are people who have money and people who are rich.” Trump is the former.

In the normal course of human events, it is rare to come across someone who is openly a serial liar, racist, homophobe, nativist and the more we see of Trump, the more people wonder: how can this be true, that one person could so publicly display his duplicity, lack of morality, aversion to kindness hostility toward people less fortunate than himself and on and on. People seem to believe there is more to the man; there simply must be. No one can be this shallow and empty a soul and still have friends and still be respected by people who, superficially at least, are themselves respectable.

I suggest again that the search for a complex solution to these questions is hopeless and pointless. Trump is exactly what he appears to be and there is zero chance that he will change. The life forces that produced this person are not likely to suddenly produce a revelation in which Trump will come to understand how horrible a person he is. He will simply deny everything and carry on as before. If imprisoned ultimately for his crimes against the country and against humanity, he will be led away in chains proclaiming that the American system of justice was rigged against him, that he is in fact the greatest victim of all time. Look at me! Look at me!

Much has been made of Trump’s appetite for cheap hamburgers and of his apparent inability to spell or use complete English sentences in his speech. Again, this is finding complexity when a simpler and more obvious explanation exists. Trump’s malapropisms and misspelled/misused words in his tweet tantrums are, I suggest, deliberate acts to draw attention to him and away from both his “policies” and his treasonous guilt. The more Trump gets people guffawing over his style mistakes, the less they will focus on his misconduct and incompetence.

Granted, this strategy is only partially successful. Trump’s substantive failings get plenty of attention in the Twitterverse and in the political media, but that attention is a fraction of what it might be if he were not, metaphorically, dressed in a clown suit, squeezing his nose while making honking sounds and all the other distractions on which he trades.

In the end, it’s not going to work. Robert Mueller’s investigation seems itself to be an example of Occam’s razor at work. Mueller’s team is sifting through mountains of evidence to get at simple truths that state, yes, he is guilty. Stated metaphorically, when there is this much smoke, one of two explanations is true: there is fire or there is not. Bet on “not” at your peril and keep your day job.