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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 often think how cozy it must be to live with the child's view of politics. They disagree with me, those idiots!
What is stupidity, what is intelligence? What is their value? With intelligence as a descriptor we attempt to measure and describe something else. It's IQ and g, the thing itself, "it." What is it? It's building skyscrapers plural with your name on them and being elected POTUS twice with the most powerful media machine in the world standing against you. Trump has it, so when someone says he lacks intelligence, maybe! But he doesn't lack it, so if he lacks intelligence its value is far less than we think, if it has any at all.
It's the most complicated game and just because Trump has it doesn't mean he always or even often makes the right decisions. He made plenty of bad decisions in his first term, but here I must observe in those areas firmly under the executive's direct purview, where he didn't have to delegate it into an adversarial bureaucracy or broker with an ambivalent-at-best congress or wait and hope for the court's approval, he delivered two unequivocal aces. No further adventurism in the Middle East, and his strong attempt to normalize relations with North Korea. Had it been Obama with Un on the DMZ the picture would have won a Pulitzer and Obama would have won a second Nobel Prize. Instead, like so many truly historic pictures of Trump-as-President, it's just another icon ghettoed to where few beyond his supporters both know and appreciate. When Trump can play the game without an arm or both tied behind his back, he wins, and this is indicative of it.
As for his cabinet and advisors, I'll only talk about one: Stephen Miran. The last few weeks has seen a lot of discussion on the tariffs, including one particular user who opened his brief fluff of criticism by repeatedly calling Trump a retard. Is Miran? Because it's his work, his exploration of the potential hazards of holding the reserve currency and holding trade deficits and how tariffs might correct these hazards, that is influencing the Oval Office (after Trump's old affinity for tariffs). When your adversary does something incomprehensible, it's the vapid feel-good shortcut to say it's because they're stupid. They can be wrong, and the sum of everything that makes them wrong may be an indict of their reasoning, but that conclusion isn't useful. It doesn't help your own decision-making. It's a belief, or it may be true outright, but either way it doesn't pay rent. What does is knowing that everything: what do they read, or what do the people they listen to read? What do they believe, what ideas do they hold, what's their ethos? Assuming necessarily they reached their conclusions through reason, what were those reasons? I've lately been arguing here very strongly in favor of absolute sovereign authority to expel foreigners with the minimum possible due process. I know the people disagreeing with me aren't stupid and I don't think they're evil. I'll be the first to say if they were right, their fears would be justified entirely, and I don't fault them for those fears either, it's eminently rational, their conclusions logically follow from their premises. We differ in premises, and I would be doing myself a disservice let alone everyone else if I just said "Of course you believe that, you're stupid." They're not, and Trump isn't either. The establishment left certainly isn't, yeah I'm here on record calling Biden demented behind the wheel, but the people who were actually making the decisions behind him are competent, are intelligent, and did a damn good job, though thankfully not enough, at the end.
The world is as it has always been because powerful, competent and intelligent people disagree with each other. There are moral judgments to be made sure but oh, does all history stand as the final testament on evil not being synonymous with stupid--nor good with intelligent.
That's not terrible prose but how do you square the idea that Trump isn't stupid with the fact that he apparently doesn't know how his beloved tariffs work?
I talked about the int-econ101 theory of tax incidence last week, if you don't trust the sophisticate version https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316188?context=8#context
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Miran covers this is in his paper, presenting his argument of China as having effectively paid for the 2018-2019 tariffs.
If tariffs cause the average consumer to pay +$1800/year when they don't make +$1800/year, or simpler, if tariffs are causing people to spend money in excess of increased wages, what would they care of a stronger dollar? Miran also covers this:
The game of tariffs appears far more complex than "cost passed to consumers" but I'm just copy-pasting Miran, I don't know economics.
His argument is that in essence China can opt to weaken Yuan proportionally to the tariff, and simply decrease the costs of exports to the extent that their new prices in USD + tariff overhead ≈ old prices in USD; alternatively, Chinese suppliers themselves can secretly be operating with a massive margin and drop the prices directly. Well, I don't know if this will fly this time, especially if the dollar itself weakens. In any case, China can simply not do any of that.
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There’s enough ambiguity in the chain of causality that anyone can be said to ultimately pay for something. Trump also said mexico will pay for the wall. The people love to hear the tale of the paying foreigner, it really gets them going.
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Ah yes, the enlightened one. Please grace us with your superior wisdom and reasoning, that we may not err in our ways.
I genuinely don't believe that Trump is stupid, and I'll even extend that to say that I don't believe that Vance is stupid. I would say that even cabinet members like RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon aren't strictly stupid, but rather wildly out-of-touch to the point that anything they say is completely unrelatable and easily interpreted as "stupid".
My whole point is that my concern isn't stupidity, and that "stupid" is a useless epithet that doesn't further the conversation at all. You would seem to be in passionate agreement.
Graciously, I'll ask if you're extending the concept of "stupidity" to "incompetence" - because our disagreement would simply be that you're straw-manning my entire argument: "How juvenile it is to think that powerful people are stupid." I personally think those are two separate concepts, where "incompetence" has the additional dimension of context, but "stupid" is wide-ranging. I'll even argue that Trump is not universally incompetent - and has shown great competence in certain facets both in Trump I and Trump II and during his 10-year electoral campaign. Your examples of a diplomatic visit with NK and a drawdown of some activities in the Middle East are great (although I struggle to see what fruits they've bared in the past 8 years).
I appreciate your counter-example of Stephen Miran. Navarro does not inspire confidence that Trump has a good eye for economic advisors (as signs pretty much indicate Navarro lost his mind somewhere around 2015), but I'll give Miran the benefit of the doubt that he has not yet lost his mind. He seems to be hand-picked to support the conclusions that Trump has already reached, so I'm already skeptical, but again, that is not in-and-of-itself proof of his incompetence. All of that is bailey anyway, where the motte is that actually Trump's economic policy is highly calculated and we're aiming for is maintaining our very high average standard of living (at least, for certain classes of people) while also convincing the rest of the world to drop USD as a reserve currency as it presents an existential risk that no one but Trump is bold enough to face head-on. I don't disagree that the world holding USD as a reserve currency is an existential risk, but my main question is: why does it have to be 5D chess? Does the success of the strategy rely on none of the world (including his own constituents) being privy to exactly why certain economic policies are being executed? Is that the secret sauce? It has to be 5D chess or we won't be able to both maintain our standard of living while also convincing the world that they shouldn't hold USD? This is my issue broadly with many Trump strategies - I'm told I just don't get it and it's all part of a bigger plan. Well, it would be great if we were told that plan. To put it simply, when someone says "trust me bro", I instantly do not trust them, bro.
Back to the topic of the OP, the thrust of my point is that I've observed a certain type of arrogance over my lifetime that has been tightly paired with the rejection of expertise, and that I'm seeing the same pattern daily coming out of the executive. That's my signal through the noise. I tie that arrogance (and apathy) back to something that I thought everyone here might be able to relate to, the "pit in your stomach" when you realize you've fucked up because you're out-of-depth. I also tied it to the worst amphetamine-fueled mistake that an authoritarian made during WW2. Your critisicm is basically that my interpretation of the situation is juvenile?
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