Maureen Dowd, calling Donald Trump a “7-year-old wild child,” joins fellow New York Times columnist, David Brooks, in seeing Trump as childlike, not childish.

In my previous post, I quoted David Brooks as saying that the reason President Trump accepts “alternative facts” is that he is sometimes like a “5-year-old.”

It is significant that both Dowd and Brooks specify the age, because there is an important distinction between childish and childlike, and when you specify a particular age—“7-year-old” or “5-year-old”—the implication is childlike, not just childish.

Childish: a person who is acting like an immature adult.

Childlike: an adult who sometimes behaves at a child’s level of cognitive and social development; for example, like an adult in a fantasy story who has switched personalities with a child; or like a real-life adult with multiple personality who has switched to a child-aged alternate personality.

Dowd and Brooks would probably disavow my interpretation and insist they only meant that Trump sometimes acts immaturely. But their specifying the age—seven or five—supports my interpretation.

Search “childlike” to see a few previous posts.

Maureen Dowd. “Wild Child Takes Charge.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/opinion/sunday/wild-child-takes-charge.html?ref=opinion