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I feel that arguing him not being "stupid" might be a bit of a straw man. Few people would literally claim that he has an IQ of 85. I am 90% sure that I could outperform him in math-y intelligence and 99% sure that he would utterly crush me in political intelligence. There was also a tendency here at the motte to see him as a 5d chess master who has planned twice as many moves ahead as the other players. This is also not supported by evidence.
Trump's great asset has always been that the elites hate him, and that it is common knowledge that they hate him. He has an uncanny instinct for politics and a showed a ruthless disregard for the truth since he started his political career backing the Birther conspiracy.
That being said, stupid is as stupid does, and he has made plenty of stupid mistakes. Most of his first presidency was uneventful. Sure, you had all the drama and frequent changes of secretaries which you would have expected if you put a narcissist reality TV star in the White House, but apart from putting a few migrant kids in cages and making every other news broadcast start with "President Trump tweeted today", he did not accomplish much, good or bad. Then he under-estimated COVID, went on to say to some book writer that he was purposefully downplaying it not to tank the economy and utterly lost the 2020 election to some back-bencher who seems about 50 years older than Obama seemed.
Denying the election results was evil, but not stupid. He thrives on controversy, and it meant that he got to keep his cult of personality going. However, I would argue that J6 was indeed intended to stop the senate from certifying the election, and it was a stupid plot which was never going to work and made him show his utter disdain for the political process. (Some might argue that the real goal was to get some MAGA shot and turn him into a Horst Wessel, which would be less stupid.)
In 2024, the Democrats handed him the election. They had won against him with a weak candidate, and for some reason decided to test how much weaker a candidate could win, because they were largely caught in their own woke filter bubble.
Since then, there have been clear signs that Trump II would be different from Trump I. Before, Trump already had a weird loyalty fetish, but now he is pretty open about selecting for loyalty long before considering ability. Luckily for the world, there are not a ton of people who are both competent and willing to swear eternal homage to Trump. The US in 2025 is not medieval Europe, where the most qualified people might have been minor nobles educated in a monastery who would swear allegiance to you in a heartbeat if you dangled a fief in front of him. The Ivy League is not only producing woke people, they produce (some) highly competent woke people, most of which will stay way clear of Trump's cabinet. And in general, I think that DC lacks the culture of personal loyalty which Trump likes so much. At most, you get some loyalty to the party, but if you want to find someone in civil service who will put Trump before the combined forces of the constitution and their self-interest, you are indeed scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The tariff debacle was stupid for the interests of the US from its inception to the announcement that electronics from China would be exempt, and I am confident that if there is another chapter to this saga, it will be just as stupid. The steelman for Trump's intelligence here is that he is utterly uninterested in the economic outcome and only engages in market manipulation, or is under some geas to produce a certain amount of news and outrage every week.
If it's a straw man, then it's a very common one: it's a cliche Redditism, at the very least. Blue Tribe will always call their enemies stupid: even Vance is called a Appalachian hillbilly when he is arguably one of the most self-made men of our times. It stems from the belief that their enemies are stupid and evil. You can't possibly be good and smart and oppose what they do.
Yeah that was kind of my whole point. Is there a way to argue the blue tribe's concern without resorting to "they're stupid". I did not make the argument coherently enough because the main rebuttal I've received is basically ~ "why are you calling them stupid".
My argument is that they're arrogant and out-of-depth, and my evidence is their wide-ranging rejection of expertise. The argument against would be that they do truly know better than the experts they're purging and alienating and there's nothing worth worrying about.
Haidt's foundations of morality is a good basis for this.
Imagine you are in a kindergarden and you open up your lunchbox and find out your mother has packed you a candy bar, and the kid immediately besides you starts whining to you to share (fairness). But you were given this chocolate bar by your mother, and it is yours (liberty). Eventually, the kindergarden teacher comes over and obliges you to share with the whole class (authority).
Now, I bet you can come up with results where fairness is liberty, and sometimes that does line up. But in many cases, equality to all means coercion to some, and to the conservative mind that is intolerable. It's a difference in terminal values that is irreconcible, but it's not evil. And if experts (authority) are not on the side of liberty, then it doesn't matter how much they know (or claim to know.)
The kindergarden teacher may have infinite knowledge compared to a kindergardener but it never feels great to be coerced to do the right thing. There is no such thing as an expert in moral authority (the absence of the philosophical numina known as God.) The experts, lacking omniscience, are merely imposing their moral preferences on you without attempting to convince you and that is fundamentally against freedom as a value.
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