I wish they’d all go to lunch and never come back.
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captain covid
I think he has a certain cunning for PR, media-manipulation, and self-promotion. That’s not the same as being Actually Smart.
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I’m partial to “Hair Furor”.
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Mark my words; eventually, there will be an entire book filled only with mean nicknames and slurs for 45, and it won’t be short.
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merkin von bankrupt.
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The Republican Party spent decades pandering to a segment of stupid and cruel voters who, eventually, when they had an opportunity, selected one of their own, somebody like them, to lead, instead of one of the designated aristocrats
When a car spins off a mountain road and hits a tree we don’t admire the cunning of the tree
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A common mistake is to assume that one has to be smart to be a confidence artist. The truth is that a snake oil salesman only has to be smarter than the marks he finds.
Sad to say, there are a lot of stupid suckers out there in America. Biff, thanks to his inherited privilege and his addiction to media attention, has managed to uncover the bulk of them over the course of his career as the country’s foremost public grifter.
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An idiot savant, not a genius.
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If you insist.
The opinion that there is a single metric that measures general intelligence is widely regarded as discredited; ‘IQ’ as a measure cuts with a very dull knife.
He has a specific talent for a particular form of persuasion, and is very, very good at it. He is unquestionably deficient in other areas that contribute to ‘intelligence’ but certainly has exhibited an extraordinary level of social functioning, at least when measured by the standard of his ability to attain high political office.
So, yes, he is a genius at what he does. More’s the pity, because what he does is wicked. ‘Stupid’ does not describe it. ‘Sociopathic’, ‘criminal’, or just plain ‘evil’ hit nearer the mark.
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One thing I think we can all agree on is that totally apart from questions of cortical reticulation early in life or vascular perfusion more recently, that dude is just stunningly ignorant. Even when you take into account his perceived or presumed deficits, and then factor in a literal lifetime inside the event horizon of extreme wealth, it is still just simply baffling how little he seems to actually know.
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That ignorance has proven to be no bar to him in terms of political success - so what is baffling is that the American people would elect him, not that he would refuse or be unable to learn. And I’m still not convinced that the ‘ignorant buffoon’ schtick isn’t just that: continual play-acting because his whole message is: “You’re stupid and angry? I’m stupid and angry too - vote for me!”
Among ‘tolerant’ circles, it’s fashionable to make the presumption that anyone who does wrong simply doesn’t know any better, so we use ‘stupid’ to characterize evildoers. But there comes a time when it does not explain nor excuse. Some people know or should know what they do is wrong and do it anyway. That’s not stupid. Do it once, it may be culpably impulsive. Do it as often as Trump, it’s wicked.
Trump, even giving him the benefit of the doubt for stupidity, crossed that line a long time ago. I don’t think that anyone would believe he doesn’t have the mental age of, say, a second-grader, and an ordinary second-grader, when some of Trump’s actions are explained in words within their comprehension, would be able to articulate why they’re wrong. That is either wickedness, or something that the site rules prohibit us from speculating upon. I’m not willing to accept the defense of ‘diminished responsibility’ without proof.
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telling somebody what they already want to hear is not a form of persuasion
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Yeah, he’s a grifter who is able to target a very specific group of people. If he were very good at persuasion, his approval rating would be north of 50%.
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Excellent point; a good conman who’s actually savvy with the grift would have at least 65-70% of the masses ‘eating out of their hand.’
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Or in the very least we’d see some non-trivial number of voters supporting him now who were not already supporting him in 2016.
He has had close to four years to persuade non-supporters to change their minds about him. I don’t think I’ve met a single one who has. His approval rating has basically been flatlining around 40% ever since he was sworn in.
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cough bill clinton
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Good example.
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Not once have heard about him asking a clever question in a meeting behind closed doors or looking around to see no one sees him and then sitting down and really digging into an intelligence report. World leaders who meet him unanimously report (in cases where such opinions are being made public through people in the know or clandestine recordings) that he is as dumb and frustrating in person as he is on TV.
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