Our President-elect is a simpleton
24 December 2024
In my humble opinion, Donald J. Trump is a simpleton - a person without much common sense or intelligence. Another definition is a person whose foolish actions are the subject of often-repeated stories.
Yes - he is a great entertainer who keeps us interested in his latest antics because he is so unpredictable in a way that it is somehow addictive.
Yes - he is a great con artist: “"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible."
Yes - he won two our of three elections for President.
However, if one is objective, it is clear that he has impaired intelligence (“low IQ”), perhaps average for an American but certainly inadequate for any position of importance and responsibility, much less the Presidency.
In the past week:
We read about Matt Gaetz, Trump’s choice for Attorney General of the United States.
Trump wanted to give that position to a man who paid at least half a dozen women for sex, according to the report, which was made public on Monday. And the violation of Florida’s prostitution law isn’t even the real depravity; the committee took pains to detail the underlying implication of his actions: “Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter.”
Trump wanted to give the Justice Department to a man the committee says committed the statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl. A man who is accused of setting up a phony email account at his office in the House to buy illegal drugs and who then used the drugs to facilitate sexual misconduct. A man who accepted impermissible gifts and plane trips, according to the report, and who used the power of his office to help a woman with whom he was having sex. A man whose conduct, according to his own colleagues of both parties, “reflects discreditably upon the House.”
And of course, on Trump himself. New York Times.
No sensible person would have chosen Gaetz and continued to defend him. Trump simply lacks the capability to understand what Gaetz did wrong or that Trump’s instincts could be wrong. This is a sign of low intelligence.
Trump wants the United States to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal.
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
If you think this is a rational statement, please read these articles. He clearly does not understand much about the rule of law or even care to understand. He wants it and that is enough for him. This is a sign of low intelligence.
Trump thinks that tariffs will not hurt Americans.
During his election campaign, he told voters that the taxes were "not going to be a cost to you, it’s a cost to another country". That was almost universally regarded by economists as misleading.
. . .
A survey by the University of Chicago in September 2024 asked a group of respected economists whether they agreed with the statement that "imposing tariffs results in a substantial portion of the tariffs being borne by consumers of the country that enacts the tariffs, through price increases". Only 2% disagreed. BBC
It’s not just that Trump says stupid things, but he is absolutely convinced he is correct and that everyone else is wrong. This is a sign of low intelligence.
Trump’s attempt to shut down the Federal government was irrational.
Leave it to President-elect Donald Trump to take one Washington crisis and add another one on top. As a plan to keep the federal government over the holidays began to waver this week, Trump injected a new demand: pausing — or altogether abolishing — the debt ceiling before he takes office in January.
Throughout his first term, Trump had a habit of screwing up policy agreements with 11th-hour demands that didn’t make a lot of sense, and last week’s developments suggested that the president-elect learned very little from those experiences.
A stopgap spending bill was working its way through the legislative process on Capitol Hill, which generated very little interest from Mar-a-Lago — that is, until late Wednesday afternoon, when Trump published an item to his social media platform demanding that congressional Republicans add a debt ceiling increase to the bill. Failing to do so, Trump added, would be “a betrayal of our country.”
Roughly an hour and a half later, he published a follow-up piece, adding that any Republican who would be “so stupid” as to approve a spending bill without increasing the debt limit “should, and will, be Primaried.”
On Thursday, Trump echoed his demand. A day later, he did it again.
GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill initially expressed confusion — a debt ceiling increase is still months away, and the issue played literally no role whatsoever in the negotiations surrounding the continuing resolution — before ultimately expressing indifference. On Friday night, the House and Senate approved a spending package that prevented a shutdown, and it was silent on the nation’s borrowing limit.
The one thing Trump wanted was the one thing he didn’t get.
He didn’t have to suffer this embarrassment. In fact, he didn’t have to do anything. He chose to intervene, in the 11th hour, with an odd and unnecessary demand, which Republicans rejected and left Democrats wondering aloud about his mental health.
If this were a rare setback in an otherwise flawless transition phase, it’d be easier to overlook. But the opposite is true: In the seven weeks since Election Day, Trump and his team have careened from one failure to another, as part of a pre-inaugural process that can only be described as shambolic. What’s more, by some measures, it’s getting worse, not better. MSNBC
What is the basis of Trump’s certainty that he is correct? Apparently, he gets his information from Fox and other right wing media that have a track record of lies and indifference to the truth. He is inattentive and unwilling to receive information, even regarding intelligence briefings. In addition, he worships Putin and other dictators, who lie regularly and treat Trump like a “chump”, taking advantage of his stupidity. Trump trusts his own judgment even when he is wrong over and over again. This is an example of someone who is not just stupid, but hopelessly stupid.
In his first term, he had many rational advisors who could often thwart his worst impulses. They have now been replaced by people with little to no competence but with strong loyalty to Trump. Thus, we can expect Trump’s stupidity to become more obvious.
Is Trump also:
Suffering from a dementia related disorder?
Suffering from sociopathic tendencies?
So delusional in his thinking that he is no longer legally competent?
These topics will be discussed in future essays.
The index to my prior essays (mostly post 5 November 2024) is here.
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