this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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"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.
He rubber stamped Clarence Thomas through the judiciary committee and bought the Bush "WMDs" lie hook, line, and sinker. Also had his hands all over the Patriot Act of 2001 (and it's iterative reauthorizations) and the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005, which accelerated us into our modern fascist state.
Evil or Stupid, take your pick. But the man who delivered Strom Thurmond's eulogy was one fucked choice for party leader.
I'll spot you Trump as "useful idiot", but he's been very successful at getting what he wants (money, fame, power, a slavishly loyal paramilitary intent on ethnically cleansing the country).
Maybe the US is just predisposed to delivering those results and Trump was dealt a winning hand at birth. But you can only call the guy cleaning up all the chips at the table "stupid" for so long before you start looking like a sore loser.
He knows exactly what he needs to know in order to get what he desires. And they're been nothing I've seen, to date, to suggest he's less savvy than any of the "smart" politicians he crushed on the way to the top.
His success is on the back of 40+ years of the hollowing out of government by the duopoly of neoliberal politics. He stands on the shoulders of midgets...or weaklings, or corruption, or a pile of invertebrates or something.
Trump was absolutely dealt a winning hand at birth. He was born a rich heir to a real estate mogul in New York. He failsonned, grifted, and bullied his way through multiple (mostly failed) businesses, failed up, and lived his entire adult life during an era of rapid capital expansion.
Without his riches, as you concede, he would not have the juice he needed to make a splash on the political stage.
If you want to call me a sore loser for stating clearly the plainly visible fact that Donald J. Trump is stupid, then so be it.
The guy thought that annotations on an "explainer" photograph were tattoos despite some of the annotations floating off of the guy's knuckles. He mused aloud in front of a national audience about injecting disinfectants to cure COVID. He's a stupid fucking idiot.
Like a Cordyceps, hijacking the brain of its host and spurring it on to engage in self-destructive activity. And you can reasonably claim that cordyceps is dumb as shit. But you can't argue it isn't getting what it wants.
Right. Although I keep seeing liberals cling to the theory that a Gore Presidency or a Hillary win in '16 (or even '08) or a second Biden term would have somehow averted our modern moment, rather than getting here by other means. What it consistently overlooks is the habit of Democrats in leadership - even when they've got the supermajorities and the friendly courts and the big municipal governments and major businesses in alignment - tidying things up and then sitting on their hands until they can pass power back to the fascists.
FFS, Bush Jr had the entire finance system handed to him on a silver platter in 2008. He passed control over to Obama, who politely helps the biggest plutocrats in the country get their books back in the black, and then hands everything right back to the crooks who bankrupted the system. The '08/'09 handover set the stage for our modern economic moment. Guys like Theil and Musk and Bezos couldn't exist in a world without Mega-Banks hyper-inflating tech sector asset prices. Tech monopolies are what created the social media that elevated Trump's fascist movement. And here we are.
If you want to talk about a politician being a dumb-fuck, you have to wonder at what Barry was thinking when he got in bed with both the Wall Street scorpions (who would immediately stab him in the back in the mid-year cycle) and Silicon Valley (which twisted in the wind for another decade before firmly aligning with MAGA).
Trump found some useful propaganda to circulate in order to get people to break his way. By the time he was done, it was the Democrats where trying to explain what an AI generated knuckle-tattoo looks like while Trump was happily cashing the checks Bidencrats signed to unleash his ICE paramilitary across the country.
Totally agree.
I think he had a very common liberal, capitalism-sized blind spot. I'm willing to admit I had the same one at the time. He also was definitely beholden to interests and was 0% of the communist / socialist that everyone continually pretended (and still pretends) he was.
One of his team of lackeys presented him the annotated photograph and he confused it with reality. He's oceans worth of stupid and there are countless examples of this.
I mean, back in his first term he put up a table full of blank paper and made a photo-op of it, claiming it was all the regulations he planned to undo.
"Trump didn't realize he was standing at a table full of blank paper" is a quick jab at his intelligence. But the reality was merely that Trump used a prop to sell a lie that played well with his base. And the photo-shopped knuckle tattoos were another prop to sell another lie.
Was it as cleverly rolled out and executed as the Killian documents that brought down Dan Rather or the Aluminum Tubes video that gulled Congress into war with Iraq? No. But it didn't need to be. We're getting the same results regardless of the fidelity of the image.
He got Congress to sign off on a $145B increase to the ICE budget by leveraging AI generated smears. That's not what I'd call stupid.
His base is stupid too. We've already been over this. 🥱
It wasn't mearly photoshopped. It was annotated. He insisted that the 20pt Arial annotations were actually tattoos.
If you want to believe he's some type of genius, it's clear I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise. So I'll man woman person TV camera see my way out. Covfefe!
His base has been indoctrinated over a lifetime to believe white nationalist propaganda. The Republican Party has been flirting with white nationalists since... well... Rutherford B. Hayes. But not since McKinley have they ever delivered on Trump's scale.
They don't care that the image is fake, either. They just want thirty years of "the brown people are invading, we have to fight back!" to pay off.
Almost as though its value was in propaganda rather than fact.
The national humiliation that accompanies Trump's rise is that he is clearly and painfully stupid and that it does not matter.
He telegraphs his movements. He loudly announces all of his intentions. It does not matter, because the game is rigged.
It's not isolated to Trump. Every business idiot in the last quarter century has gotten this type of treatment (https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/) despite the fact that they continually promise vague bullshit and cannot even deliver upon that.
America is a place where we tell ourselves that the "American Dream" is a real possibility, despite all of the contrary evidence. We write whole tomes based upon the supposition of "meritocracy" in a country where it is amongst the least likely to be true. Class mobility in the United States has been less possible decade after decade for the last half-century and the yet this type of "rise and grind" mythology has become even more popular. (I think these types of paradoxical phenomena are everywhere you look in America, but that's a completely different discussion.)
The idea of the powerful, rich, famous, or the grand trifecta being complete fucking dunderheads that Peter principle their way into further destroying any justice or good works of our country on the backs of their own greed is something that is too painful for most people to fathom, but it's nonetheless true.
He's stupid. It doesn't matter that he's stupid. In fact, it's better for the forces that are trying to accomplish real goals that he is stupid. He distracts us from the boundlessly evil ghouls who would not win an election themselves, but are vicious, ruthless, and competent.
That's WWE rules. It only looks "stupid" because it is intended as a spectacle rather than a sport. Turning around to showboat to the crowd so your opponent can get behind you and hit you with a steel chair looks really dumb, until you realize its all just part of the show.
We're living in a system that rewards sales and marketing at the expense of any material results. Calling some of the best sales and marketing guys in the country "stupid" because they're selling saline and snake oil only makes sense if you're rating them on their efficacy rather than their sales volume.
He's one of the most successful propagandists and public speakers in a generation. He's pulled himself out of bankruptcy over and over again, in large part thanks to his skill at manipulating peers into lending him more money when the long line of creditors he's fucked over is practically urban legend. He's known exactly who to make friends with in order to advance his career, straight from NYC real estate failson to crime family money laundering machine to political money-laundering mega-donor to Epstein confidant to FOX News special guest to GOP nominee, beating out dozens of professional politicians on his way to the top.
The fact that he's rope-a-doped so many other political and business peers would suggest he's more competent than anyone wants to credit. The fact that he's repeatedly said how much he loved Mussolini, executed the Mussolini playbook practically down to the letter, and still left liberals second-guessing his skills when they had him dead-to-rights in between '21 and '25, suggests he's just smart enough to be a two-term President.
Which marks him out as smarter than all the folks who lost to him along the way.
Sometimes it isn't even their sales volume. Look at the numbers on AI. As the podcast crowd would say "the math doesn't math". It doesn't matter because those evaluating them are also a combination of stupid and complicit.
You keep insisting that winning an election means you're "smarter" than the opponent. There is absolutely zero evidence to support your claim.
Also, by your own weird equating of intelligence and electoral results then Joe Biden is smarter than Donald Trump and you already said that he's stupid.
They're pushing it out relentlessly. I don't think you can fault anyone for lack of name recognition or (initial) adoption. The numbers don't make sense for revenue, but this is hardly the first time a tech company has been underwater for a decade before coming out as a profit squeezing giant.
They're also in sales. The big news media periodicals are fully just Native Ads now.
People who are exceptional at their jobs are traditionally described as "Smart", at least within their fields.
A claim I heard endlessly in '21. He was the only guy skilled enough to beat Trump, which is why everyone else had to drop out and clear the way during the '20 primary. Also, why he refused to step down during the '24 primary.
It might have held up, if he hadn't flubbed it and dropped out after one bad debate.
Yep, complicit.
He's not exceptional at his job either. His job isn't to get elected and he even flubbed that in 2020. It's also not to develop and nurture a cult of personality. If you're talking about enriching himself, and you think that's the primary or sole job of a politician...then sure? I think other people had traits that prevented them from becoming a full-on kleptocrats, and more broadly speaking I don't think most people would think the job of a politician is solely to enrich themselves.
So you potentially buy that Biden is smarter than Trump because he beat Trump in 2020, that Biden is stupid, and yet somehow Trump is not stupid?
LOL, man, what are you trying to even discuss here?
Look, it's possible to not succeed at achieving your goals (whatever they may be) for garden variety of reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence.
Trump is incessant, persistent, relentless, ruthless, unscrupulous, hedonistic, impulsive, a pathological liar, shameless, immoral, bought and paid for, and would be nihilistic if he weren't so narcissistic.
There are a large amount of very smart dorks that have impediments (that have largely nothing to do with intelligence) that prevent them from achieving their objectives.
There are also people who have actual values and do not believe in continually violating them in order to achieve whatever their objective may be. If you think that's stupid, that's like your opinion, man. But I wouldn't go around shooting people to succeed in my job goals, even if it would make me successful at achieving them.
He's won the Presidency twice and he's forced the opposition party to make enormous concessions to his ideological end goals both times.
It is to get elected and to get allies elected. And now he's President again with a Congress even more MAGA-pilled than in 2016.
A system's purpose is what it does, and it sure looks like the thing elected offices do is enrich their office-holders. So in that sense, he's done a stellar job.
If you go back up to the very tippy top, I'm noting how "stupid" gets flung around as a pejorative, which inevitably leads opposition groups to underestimate people and play into their hands.
Reagan, Bush, and Trump have all been excellent instances of this. Hell, Clinton, too (Bush Sr had him pegged as a know-nothing hick). Obama as well, if you consider how Hillary got fleeced in the primary.
Values like "Greed is Good", "AIs are superior to humans", and "Israelis are entitled to a militant ethno-nationalist enclave state". They're the ones currently running the country.
There are some very, very good poker players who cannot tell you the name of the state they took all your money in, because they could not be bothered to learn the name.
It is asinine to insist they are stupid and you are smart when you're the one wearing the barrel-with-suspenders.
You may like this quip, and I'll admit I'm partial to it myself, but it's just a quip. A system can have other purported or actual purposes and then simply not be structured correctly to reach them. The quip is skeptical and cynical, but not everyone is a cynic, and not all non-cynical people are stupid.
Great? The values espoused or imposed by the currently ruling regime aren't universally shared even in fully developed totalitarian states.
A better analogy is if there was a poker player that came into the game with more chips than any other player at the table, was allowed to continually and openly cheat and evade the established rules of the game, and was still crowned the winner. Is that player possibly stupid? Yes, it very easily could be the case that he is.
Trump's chief insight in his entire life is that the people who enforce the rules in this country are weak-willed and will fold under applied pressure. That's not exactly theory of relativity stuff, and many other people knew this just as well as Trump but were restrained by other things that don't apply to Trump from exploiting it.