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Yes, this is trivially true across different dimensions of success, regardless of how you want to rationalize your support of Trump.
Did you think you're cooking here?
People can compete on anything, there are countless hierarchies of prestige, aptitude and competence. It is possible to leverage intelligence for greater success in a cognitively less demanding field, and it's correlated with other beneficial qualities, so elite performers, swindlers, sex workers, athletes are usually smarter than their mediocre peers, on top of domain-specific excellence. This, however, is not strictly necessary, so you get people like Yao Ming who are just very blessed on the most relevant dimension of endowment. This is most purely expressed in simple sports like sprinting and weight lifting. In fact, a strictly subhuman creature (a dog, a horse or a clanker) can outperform the best humans there.
But intelligence is extremely correlated with success in cognitively demanding fields. Hence, for example, results of SMPY, and I would never insist that some STEM luminary is "dumb actually" – even if he does say or do stupid things or at least things I disagree with; he may have particular reasons for bias, ignorance or feigning them, or I could just be wrong.
Big politics in the US is not a cognitively demanding field, so your argument is nonsensical. For an outgroup example, Gavin Newsom is a highly successful politician, perhaps a future President, does well in podcasts, and he's generally an accomplished man with an Instagram-perfect upper class White family, with a rich dad, just like Trump. His SAT was 960, which is slightly below the median (he can cope about medical reasons but it's bullshit), he has zero interesting thoughts and there's no evidence he's good at administering his domain. In other words, it's possible to be in the top 0.001% of success while being in the bottom 53% of the population intellectually. This is all obvious. This is, in fact, the promise of American dream (or Middle Eastern dream). You don't have to be a genius to succeed. You don't need truth, or knowledge, or any authentic superiority, you just need to grind and hustle and have "chutzpah". Then again, a rug merchant or a pimp, though a simple creature, is acutely aware of human status signals. He understands that the literati may look down on him, so he develops this kind of retarded doctrine about "success" in general.
Trump has no remarkable successes outside big politics. He's a shitty businessman and a so-so entertainer, roughly Vince McMahon tier. His political views are primitive, his object level knowledge of the world is patchy at best, he's incurious, he's repetitive. We have zero evidence to suspect that he's intelligent. It's just this circular insistence that Americans voted for him so he is "successful" so he's "not an idiot", and then you walk in circles like a smug blind pony. Your model doesn't require intelligence to exist at all, as a variable, and you don't believe truth or reality even matter, they are all downstream of "material success". In your book, Perelman is dumber than Trump because he didn't rally retards to elect him and then use this to enrich his corrupt son-in-law. Perelman doesn't even have a son-in-law, what schmuck. Any illiterate Patel with a highway motel mogs him.
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