Fed up with the slowness and expense of modern brain research and anxious to prove that he has an IQ higher than that of Rex Tillerson, LeBron James or all the Clintons and Obamas combined, President Trump has authorized the mapping of his own brain. Once a considerable amount of probing by Bill Nye the Science Guy had actually located something that seemed to resemble a brain under a thatch of something that seemed to resemble hair, the work proceeded quickly under the supervision of Vladimir Putin even as the President ignored storm damage unremedied in Puerto Rico, fires ravaging the American West, and an unguided and understaffed government stumbling along in disarray.
The map of the President’s brain appears to be quite different from the maps of human brains prepared by scientists as reported in places like The Atlantic Monthly and Wikipedia. Instead, the Trumpian brain map contains quixotic features reminiscent of the works of a medieval cartographer with an incomplete knowledge of world geography and history.
Naked mythological features and gargoyles grace the margins of the Trumpian brain map, just as they do the maps at museums and expensive art galleries.
In one corner of the Donald’s brain otherwise as empty as Utmost Thule stands a beaming, troll-like figure surrounded by scantily-clad Naiads, a tableau that appears to represent a part of the brain stem encoded for the urge to grope the winners of self-sponsored beauty pageants– or perhaps simply envy of Harvey Weinstein. In a another corner an hirsute Aeolus blows fierce winds devoid of content into a conch shell. This figure almost surely represents certain instinctively combative traits: it is a version of the basal ganglia chain that finds its most complete expression in Rudy Giuliani and New Jersey politicians. If this hypothesis is correct, the recumbent Triton lying on a rubber raft in the medulla oblongata may represent a mitochondrial form of Chris Christie—virtually all that is left of Chris Christie after Trump got through with him.
The central part of the president’s brain contains many concentric lines and folds, like a detailed topographic map. Discarding the thesis that this wrinkled cortex could mirror the first executive’s physique, researchers sought in vain to excite neurons in a vast terra incognita believed to have been blighted by Trump’s having been assigned to read the poem
“The Wasteland” in high school. (Whether the President actually read that piece of assigned reading, or indeed anything at all, is something science has been unable to confirm.) On the other hand, inert tissues associated with pleasure would fire up brightly throughout the brain whenever the President taunted Bill Nye the Science Guy with threats to cut off funding for both environmental research andpublic broadcasting, uttered the word “Pocohantas,” or simply looked at a drawing of a wall.
Reproduced in three dimensions, the map becomes impenetrably dense and virtually indecipherable, much as the results of the functions it represents must appear to other elected officials, presidential appointees and our nation’s allies and enemies. At the end of the day the research the president has undergone may shed little light on the nature of human cognition or the presidential thought processes, if any. But it has made a contribution to science nevertheless by locating in the brain of the leader of the free world the densest concentration of dark matter in the universe.