In this short volume that delivers irreverence and earnestness in roughly equal measure, Daniel Drezner seeks to shed light on the presidency of Donald J. Trump and its implications for American government. To understand Trump’s behavior in office and his exercise of presidential power, Drezner argues, we need to recognize that “Trump’s psychological makeup approximates that of a toddler. He is not a small child. But he sure as heck acts like one” (p. 3). The thesis of the book is that Trump’s behavior as president is best explained by seeing him as a toddler: the Toddler in Chief.

Nearly the entire book is devoted to documenting that Trump is a “petulant child” (p. 32) trapped in a man’s body. The first eight chapters (of nine) focus on specific traits, with titles like “Temper Tantrums” and “Short Attention Spans.” In each, Drezner unloads a small avalanche of block quotes from journalists and others—particularly Trump’s own appointees, aides, subordinates, and advisers—that previously appeared in popular media outlets and that depict Trump as some version of “a small, bratty child.” These lengthy quotes are knitted together by Drezner’s commentary, which often features still more quotes from still other observers. The totality of quotes constitutes the main evidentiary basis of the book.

In the final chapter, Drezner explores the larger consequences of his “toddler thesis,” arguing that our system of government is ill equipped to handle a man-child as president. The upshot is that the Toddler in Chief has done “damage to the United States polity in five important ways” (p. 191)—by inflicting “carnage” on our foreign policy, making excessive use of unilateral powers, deconstructing the federal bureaucracy, shredding democratic norms, and paying little price for all the devastation he has wrought.

Throughout, Drezner argues that there was no rhyme, reason, or strategy to Trump’s policies and political choices. He’s done what he’s done—and crippled America and the world in the process—because he’s a pouting, peevish little boy who wields massive power and can’t be contained. The lesson for the nation? “The American presidency needs to be child-proofed” (p. 208). Congress isn’t up to the task, nor are the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the media, or even his closest confidants and advisers. Ultimately, then, responsibility falls on the American public. If the dangers of a toddler president are to be avoided in the future, Drezner says, the American people must recognize that, at bottom, they are the source of the problem. And to set things right, they need to “grow the hell up” (p. 208) and insist on presidents who act like adults.

Within political science, Drezner joins a long tradition of scholarship that seeks to understand presidential behavior mainly by reference to the traits of the individual who occupies the office. Ever since Richard Neustadt famously argued that the presidency requires a man of “extraordinary temperament,” psychological profiles and theories about character, personality, disposition, and style have been standard fare in the literature. Journalists, too, routinely understand the presidency in distinctly personal terms, focusing relentlessly on “the man” and his idiosyncrasies.

As personal portraits go, Drezner’s characterization has obvious merit. In important respects, Trump does behave like a toddler. He does throw temper tantrums. He does have a short attention span. But even if we stick to personal traits, Drezner’s toddler metaphor excludes a lot. Trump also harbors autocratic yearnings. He is cruel, imperious, and vindictive. He is a bully. He is a pathological liar. He demands complete loyalty. He refuses to learn. He is purposely vulgar and offensive. And let it also be said that he can be charming, funny, and charismatic. All of these qualities ought to inform any personalized explanation of Trump’s behavior as president—yet Drezner pushes them aside and goes all in with the toddler metaphor.

More importantly, Drezner exalts trait-based explanations of presidential behavior, and he dismisses those that look beyond the individual. “The dirty little secret about much of political science,” he says, “is that individual leaders are not presumed to matter. Political scientists have long privileged structural and institutional factors over the importance of individual leaders.… The discipline forgot that individual leaders can make a huge difference in governance outcomes.… A president’s psychological makeup matters more than ever” (p. 205). Here again, Drezner stakes out a methodological position—quite a fundamental one—that he does not explore or justify. He pays no attention to what structural-institutional explanations might look like or have to offer, and he does nothing to show that his toddler thesis is somehow superior.

No serious presidency scholar believes that the individual doesn’t matter. In Trump’s case, personal characteristics may matter a lot, at least in some ways, for reasons that go well beyond his toddler-like traits. But that said, what we cannot learn from this focus on the individual is profound. By narrowing the focus in that way, we will never come to understand why a person like Trump was elected in the first place, why he exercised power and made the policy choices he did as president, and why he took actions so threatening to democracy. To know these things, we need to connect Trump to his political environment, to institutions, to the socioeconomic forces of our times—and, in particular, to populism. And we need to recognize that, whatever his personality may be, he is a political actor whose incentives and opportunities are structured by the larger context. This approach, which Drezner shunts aside, has been the norm within the presidency field for decades. And there is a reason for that: it is far more enlightening and informative and provides a far more powerful explanation than a singular focus on the individual.

Trump is not simply a president with a bizarre personality. He is a populist demagogue who rose to power by recognizing, fueling, and exploiting a surge of populist anger and discontent with the existing system—strategically following a well-tested playbook long relied on by populist demagogues throughout the world. They attack democratic institutions as illegitimate and corrupt, undermine the rule of law, egregiously violate democratic norms, portray the media as liars and enemies of the people, wage war on the truth, disparage experts and science, vilify racial minorities and immigrants, traffic in conspiracy theories, threaten to put opponents in jail, embrace dictators, impede the peaceful transfer of power, and otherwise subvert democracy. As president, Trump actively engaged in all of these behaviors during his four turbulent years in office, seriously threatening our system of self-government. Did he do these things because he had the psyche of a toddler? No. In the major ways that really count, he behaved as he did because he was a populist—and because, during times of antisystem grievance and rage, these kinds of behaviors bring political payoffs.

Not everything Trump did as president was driven by populism, of course. To exercise power as president, he needed the support of the orthodox Republicans in Congress, the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells of the American political world. They were not populists, but he was happy to give them what they wanted—tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judges, attacks on Obamacare—if they would put up with his antidemocratic behaviors and his populist assaults on international trade and immigration, and if they would circle the wagons to protect him from political harms—which they did. And as populism crept more deeply into the American body politic, the terms of the arrangement evolved. Trump soon emerged as the Republican Party’s cult figure and standard-bearer, with increasing numbers of orthodox Republicans either leaving office or joining his cause. Can we explain Trump’s coalitional politics and its many ramifications—including his transformation of the Republican Party—by pointing to his childish personality? Again, the answer is no. Yet his coalitional politics, like his populist demagoguery, was a central feature of his presidency.

We could go on. The point is simply that Drezner’s portrayal of Trump as the Toddler-in-Chief just doesn’t explain very much. It is amusing, and in some respects, it is brutally accurate in what it says about the man’s personality. But it doesn’t have much to tell us about the Trump presidency, its policies, its politics, and its dangers to American democracy. These are the things we need to know and understand.