this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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So much of the last 30 years of Republicanism (maybe 60 years, if you're a Nixonian) boils down to Owning The Libs.
The guy with the "Trump was right..." hat will happily bitch about all the things Trump is doing wrong. He just won't do it in earshot of anyone he thinks is to his Left.
Trump is turning the rhetoric of the Reagan Era into reality. He's taking the orthodoxy of the party seriously, rather than using it as bait to gull the rubes into another round of tax cuts and privatizations.
It's this commitment to orthodoxy that his base loves. Also what makes him look stupid.
I agree that the party orthodoxy is stupid and contradictory. But he's also profoundly stupid which is why he's such a perfect fit as its mascot.
Eh. Intelligence is clearly not how you get ahead in elected politics. Even when Biden wasn't teetering on the edge of senility, he was still dumb as bricks. Didn't stop him from being a senior Senator, then a VP, then a President. Meanwhile, the Smarties like Romney and Cruz and Buttigieg and Bloomberg routinely face-plant in the face of even the most mild popular opposition.
Intelligence is sometimes a handicap in politics. You're right, and that is especially the case in American politics. As far as Trump goes, I would say his intelligence was never a hindrance he had to manage in any way because he is, was, and always will be abundantly stupid.
Idk if I'd call it a handicap. I'd say it is tangential to the goal of building a large base of supporters, particularly when the "intelligent" move you see before you is to fatten your own wallet or adhere to some big money economic orthodoxy in order to climb the corporate ladder.
Like, the classic examples of this were Hillary v Obama in 2008 and Hillary v Donald in 2016. Hillary Clinton was clearly smarter - and in many ways more politically savvy - than Trump. She was arguably more experienced and politically educated than Obama. And they were both miles ahead of the rest of the GOP field. Hillary had run circles around her Republican rivals for decades, cultivated networks of plutocrats that would have otherwise been Republican stalwarts, built large organizations throughout the Atlantic Coast and the Southwest to power her ambitions during the Bush Era, and added substantially to her family fortune from historical right-wing sources while at the head of the liberal leadership team in an era when Democrats as a party were on the decline.
But she got the rug pulled on her in the '08 primary, simply because she refused to admit she was wrong on her Iraq War vote six years earlier. And she got beaten again, by a whisper thin margin, because her business friendly calculus in backing NAFTA for thirty years finally caught up with her.
I would argue that Trump was significantly smarter than the median GOP primary candidate in '16 and '24. A lot of folks love to pillar him as stupid, but he clearly has an ability to read a room and reflect those feelings back to a crowd in a way DeSantis and Huckabee and Jeb! did not. He wasn't afraid to say the Iraq War was a mistake. He regularly bragged about his role in government corruption when it was clear voters assumed everyone was corrupt and considered this a point of transparency. He was more openly racist, when the base demanded more racism, and (often quixotically) more openly LGBTQ+ friendly when the base stopped giving a fuck about villainizing gay relationships. Call it Emotional Intelligence, if nothing else. The man might not even be literate, but he's clearly clever as a fox and twice as predatory.
But I also think he's a product of the historical moment. His popularity is largely a consequence of decades of political orthodoxy on Rich People Being Better Than You, hammered into the heads of his base voters. He was given a big megaphone to say "I'm a rich white guy with a hot wife, vote for me" in an era when being a rich white guy with a hot wife was a great way to build a popular base of voters.
He lucked into office in 2016 in the same way Obama lucked into office in 2008. In a prior moment, it wouldn't have worked. In this moment, he was the man that fit what Americans were being sold as Presidential.
He was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern show. He continually forced himself into the lime light every single chance he got. Even the stupidest of fools is bound to develop a skill or two along the way, and over time he did develop media skills and the ability to read a crowd. But he's still as stupid as a bag of soup.
I largely agree with you, but I think his stupidity is a selling point as well. It's what endears him to "the base". He thinks like they do: poorly, infrequently...stupidly.
"He's the worst chess grandmaster of the lot. Never stops playing, keeps ranking up, just coasting along on the sheer number of games he's played badly and learned from. Hands down, dumb as shit, I would only lose to him 99.95% of the time."
Again, I think the term "stupid" is just a pejorative at this point. If he was a democrat who kept winning upset elections and outfoxing supposedly superior opponents, what kind of liberal would talk about him this way?
He's not fixated on looking like a braniac, which means he's not getting caught in the Tucker Carlson trap of "You don't even know how many people are in Iran! How can you support bombing them?" Trump isn't claiming he's got the encyclopedia memorized. Much like Bush Jr and Reagan, he's focused on what plays well with the audience, not what sounds "smart" to the debate judges.
Is that stupid? Not when it accomplishes your intended goals.
Incidentally, one of the "dumbest" things Trump did in the wake of his '24 win was that ridiculous cryptocurrency that let him take bribes openly from foreign governments. It quickly restored him from "billionaire on paper" to "real fucking billionaire". Not because it was so insidiously clever or legalistic, but because the Biden DOJ never prosecuted him when he was out of office. What's more, the courts that Democrats refused to stack when they had a majority, have given him a free pass on criminal misconduct.
You can give a lot of credit for that to Mitch McConnell, as he spent his whole Senate career carefully staking appointed positions and encouraging career hires with Federalist Society flacks. But Trump's the guy who is going to capitalize on all McConnell's hard work and Clinton/Obama/Biden's passivity. So who really looks like the dumb-dumb here?
For direct comparison, I agree that Biden is stupid. Though I do think he was less stupid at earlier points in his life.
He is not capable of even looking like a brainiac unless the audience is also stupid or easily fooled (which is basically being temporarily stupid).
Trump still looks stupid. He definitely is opportunistic and he is surrounded by some people that think strategically and long-term. But he's still the sloppy, stupid opportunist. He's every bit the farcical version of Hitler that Marx's quip predicts.
I feel like you're reading into me saying he's stupid and thinking that means I don't think he's dangerous. I think he's plenty dangerous. I think he's been continually written-off as a clown that nobody would approve of let alone vote for several times partially because of his stupidity and his seeming unseriousness. But he's plenty serious and still plentifully, absurdly stupid.
His stupidity helped him on multiple fronts in US politics. It helped him create a frothing base of "supporters" (a term that I don't recall many using prior to 2016), it helped his political opponents dismiss him as a serious threat, and it even helped him on the debate stage where if he could string together a series of loud words it was considered a victory for him.