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Forgive me in advance for what is mostly supposed to be a cathartic post, but also a request for criticism because it's how I'm making sense of the my observations right now, as well as the conclusion that I think is most likely.
Trump is not stupid
Or, at least, calling Trump stupid is not supported by enough evidence for it to be productive for anyone to claim that he is stupid.
The evidence against stupid
No matter your political leanings, one must admit that Trump ran one of the most impressive political campaigns, perhaps, of all time. For ten years, from 2015 to 2025, Trump was campaigning strategically without pause across the United States, building a big-tent party full of nearly every type of conservative. The Republican party was in its death throes. The Tea Party was not enough to invigorate the base. Trump performed the most impressive resurrection in over two thousand years. It was intellectually exhausting and demotivating for all of his opponents, to the point where any opposition within his own party simply quickly folded and pretended they never opposed him at all.
There's plenty of snark that Trump was born with a silver spoon and that none of his financial success is noteworthy because if had simply invested his gifts and inheritance he would have a higher net worth.[1] But if he were truly stupid, he would have simply lost all of that money with nothing to show for it.[2] Trump at least retained his wealth, which is much better than many lottery winners, drug dealers, sex workers, professional athletes, and "influencers" have to show.
It is also undeniable that Trump has a gift for delegating effectively, especially with regards to his campaign and consensus-building strategies. There is very little chance that Trump himself was in charge of choosing where to have his next campaign event, who to coordinate with locally, how to scam that podunk town out of its money, etc. The meme is that he doesn't know how to read, but if he's delegating effectively, he doesn't need to read in order to accomplish his goals. He has people for that, and they have served him especially well on the campaign trail for the past 10 years. He's also somehow able to get everyone to leave his cabinet meetings with a singular mission and idea, and the commitment is unfailing.
Trump has also trained his tongue to be sharp and clever. Like the Platonic ideal of the schoolyard bully, there has not yet been someone capable of rising to the occasion to out-Trump the Trump. Trump is completely immune to any type of attack that he himself has already mastered. Even crazier still is that Trump single-handedly killed left-wing satire and exposed it as snark. One of the most powerful tool liberals had against figures like Bush Jr., Romney, and McCain was completely neutralized by Trump. This is not something that happens accidentally: it is cold, concentrated talent, combined with years of practice. Trump is quick-witted, and that's anything except stupid.
Stupid, as a rhetorical device
The word stupid, fundamentally, is not terribly descriptive. Out of the people I know, spanning family, friends, coworkers, friends-of-friends, and significant others thereof, I can only count two individuals who I could never begin to defend against the epithet "stupid". I suspect both of these individuals have pretty significant learning disabilities. I have confirmed that they are the type that could not understand what an interest rate is, and how it affects their personal finances, no matter how long or how carefully the concept is explained to them. Their contribution to meaningful conversation caps out at, "Wow bro, that's crazy."[3]
Why even call a political figure stupid? Well, it is useful for forming in-groups and out-groups based on whether one agrees or not, or even feels compelled to agree or disagree. But that doesn't have much utility, especially because there are plenty of other methods for forming in-groups and out-groups. Let's be generous and give the benefit of the doubt that the protestor holding the "Trump is stupid" sign[4] is doing so because they seek to persuade others to change their mind regarding their support for Trump, as if those supporters will have some sudden epiphany that yes, Trump is stupid!
The fun thing about cults of personality is that any insult against the head of the cult is taken as a direct insult of members of that cult. Members of the cult aspire to be strong, smart, virtuous, and bold just like their dear leader. Their leader represents a more perfect version of themselves, so their leader must also be smarter than them. But if their leader is stupid, that makes those cult members even more stupid! Well, they know they're not stupid, so their leader must not be stupid. The members of that cult of personality will have to be "deprogrammed", as it's commonly referred to in the context of cults, in order to even begin to accept a reality where their leader is not strong, smart, virtuous, and bold.[5]
So, every time I catch someone calling Trump stupid, or anything remotely similar, I cringe. It's not supported by evidence. It's not a useful rhetorical device. That being said...
That pit in your stomach
I'd like to think that everyone has had that prototypical humbling experience, especially in your youth, of being woefully underprepared or completely out-of-depth. Maybe you forgot to study for an important exam, or to begin working on that rather important diorama. Maybe even later in life, you've made a mistake that you realized could have cost you your life. I once realized that the bushes that I had parked next to completely obscured the nearly-vertical cliff on the side of the road, and now two out of my four wheels were basically teetering over the edge. I was overconfident and unfamiliar with the terrain, and when I realized I was inches from certain death, my stomach fucking dropped.
I'd like to think that one of the most iconic photos of George W Bush captured that moment of visceral humility when he realized his presidency wasn't going to be spent reading stories about pet goats to elementary students.
Professional sports fans love to overestimate their abilities versus their sports idols: how many yards could you get on a designed run play against an NFL defensive line? There's the meme about a vast majority of American men claiming to believe the could land an airplane if they needed to. Rarely does anyone get to live the experience of testing their arrogance, although if you're a fan of some Olympic events you could go try to run a sub-4 minute mile and revel in the humility. I'll give E-Sports some credit here, because their transparent MMR system does typically convince the player base that compared to the top-level players, most players are complete trash.[6] It seems that humility is a learned trait that doesn't come naturally, and rarely do humans come face-to-face with their own mortality because of a lack of humility.
Humility, in general, brings to mind some people from grade school, middle school, and even high school who seemed to never have that "oh shit" moment during childhood. They either immunized themselves with apathy ("This grade doesn't matter.") or arrogance ("I don't need to prove anything."). Most of them were not wealthy, and therefore, continue to live relatively unremarkable lives based on their Facebook postings. I don't say this judgmentally, rather as an observation that success in school, either through good grades or learning how to work hard and take things seriously, is one of the only ways to be socially mobile in the United States. But what if they were wealthy?
My working theory is that Trump and everyone he has surrounded himself with are wildly out of their depth, in a completely unsubtle way. Do I even need to mention autism, A1 sauce, and 245% tariffs? It's not subtle, right? A major part of this is that I think they're precisely the type of people who have immunized themselves to this type of valuable introspection through apathy and arrogance. When I look at the people leading the executive branch, I see Kyle. But...is that the point?
A new model of "expertise"
When your cause is righteous, you cannot be wrong. He who saves his country, breaks no laws. Now, feelings don't care about your facts. We're operating off of vibes only from here on out.
The old model of "expertise" is out the door: it was ideologically captured by liberals. A new model of "expertise" must be created, one that by design serves not just conservative, but reactionary interests. Much like "Christian Science" is held to the constraint that any conclusion must be consistent with an American-Evangelical interpretation of the bible, this new model of "expertise" must be held to the constraint that any conclusion is consistent with reactionary ethos. And that ethos is driven by vibes, brother.
If you're a biologist that doesn't support HBD? Good bye bucko. Climate scientist that doesn't support a "things will work out, trust me bro" view on energy production? Have fun flipping patties. Economist that would dare suggest that tariffs won't even work out in the long run? Hah.
But this is surface-level snark here, and aside from disrupting careers and potentially accelerating some climate doomsday, I don't think it's worth focusing on. No, what I care about is national security, especially as we slide into authoritarianism.
Wargaming
Trump has selected heavily for loyalty, and now he's surrounded by sycophant grifters and real-life ghouls that would fit right in to any authoritarian administration you could think of: Mussolini, Pinochet, Stalin, etc. I'm not even sure if some of these people are reading history books and simply ad-libbing the speeches of these despots, or if they genuinely think they're clever and this time it will be different because of that learned apathy and arrogance. Reactionary rhetoric is like pop music, it's always the same four chords. How many pop artists succeed on vibes, and how many pop artists study the greats and emulate their formulas?
It's debatable whether the war could have had any other outcome, but Hitler didn't come face to face with true failure until Stalingrad.[7] He had drunk the Kool-Aid and genuinely believed that the German army was more righteous and mighty than any other force on Earth, combined. Despite intelligence warning him otherwise, he pushed for an offensive that overextended his army and left him on the back foot until he finally held the pistol up to his temple. He was wrong before, but it never cost him like it did that time. His mistakes never cost his country as much as they did in Stalingrad.
Hitler's mistake brings us to Wargaming: simulations that ensure that, when facing adversaries of roughly equal might and intelligence, one has the greatest chance of success. In the context of the USG, Wargaming is not limited to the Department of Defense. Wargaming is not limited to wartime activities. Wargaming is not limited to simulations that happen behind closed doors. Wargaming requires a deep trust in experts who have spent their entire careers studying mundane things like seasonal global crop yields on the 40th parallel. Wargaming is an activity that explicitly selects against loyal and uncontradicting parties.
Everything that I see from the executive branch these days indicates to me that they have lost the capacity to meaningfully wargame, and it threatens a catastrophic downfall of the United States. The military brass that have been selected for loyalty, rather than expertise, were the worst losses, but it doesn't stop there. Do you believe that RFK has the mental capacity to handle a human pandemic, let alone a livestock one? Do you believe that whoever Trump replaces Powell with will have experience running simulations on various levers the Fed can pull? I can't help but think Xi Jinping is laughing behind closed doors at the moment that he's up against such an arrogant and out-of-depth adversary.[8] Say what you will about the "Deep State", but those entrenched bureaucrats won us the cold war, and kept us on top of the world since the 1990s. And right now we're trading it for reactionary vibes.
Edit: I forgot that at one point I had meant to integrate the concept of "aping" or "cargo-cult" into this post. I thought the leaked Signal chat was an incredible example of a surface-level understanding of how a properly-executed military operation should be spoken about at the cabinet level. The cabinet is aping experience and expertise, and it won't cut it in the year 2025.
I doubt that when liberals subjected our institutions to decades of rot that you ever wrote a screed about how and why they were doing so, and why we must stop them. I will throw your critique in the trash with all of the other opinions from people who hate me and want me broke and dead.
I don't even know you? I don't even have hate for any type of person, though I do feel frustration when I think of various stereotypes of people (who I can also consciously acknowledge are just stereotypes and don't exist). If I were to make a shot in the dark about you: I actually empathize for the plight of a lot of Americans (especially rural) who feel left behind / under-served, and think the neoliberal status quo was untenable for them. But I don't think a reactionary "burn it down" federal government is going to be a win for those Americans in the end. Look how Putin sends the peasants of the hinterlands to the meatgrinder in Ukraine for a sneak-peek of how authoritarians treat forgotten classes of people.
What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date? I almost think the exploitation of those institutions (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc. and other brainrotting social media and advertising companies capturing a generation of our greatest engineering minds) are more sinister than the institutions themselves.
I am genuinely coming from a place of interest: this my best effort of putting my thoughts and coinciding fears down. What have I missed? Is the criticism you provide literally just "Your threat model is wrong, my threat model is better"?
Edit:
Also, I'm not sure why it's always presented as a given that "liberals" are guilty of any decline in the value of our societal institutions, as if it was part of an orchestrated agenda? Why do we never talk about perverse incentives? Is it because people in those institutions, or that those institutions produce, are generally liberal? Why is that so often presumed that this is due to indoctrination? I'm not going to rehash the entire sides of both arguments here, but it's such an entrenched assumption whenever it comes up...
Double-edit: Regret responding to this low-effort response because it's spawned a bunch of subthreads that have nothing to do with my main point in the original post: that the rejection of experts on ideological grounds inhibits our ability to effectively wargame against our adversaries, and we will make mistakes as a country.
That's like praising the Mafia for running a lot of great Italian restaurants when nobody else is. The reason that nobody else is running Italian restaurants is that the Mafia won't let them, not that the Mafia is particularly good at running restaurants.
You don't get credit for doing X when your rivals didn't, if the reason your rivals didn't is that you didn't let them do much of anythng at all.
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