Not Very Bright

[babylonsister]

Not Very Bright
by Karl Grossman | April 10, 2025 - 4:48am

snip//

In 2017, in the first year of the first Trump term as president, Max Boot wrote an article in Foreign Policy magazine headed “Donald Trump Is Proving Too Stupid to Be President.” It began: “The evidence continues to mount that he is far from smart—so far, in fact, that he may not be capable of carrying out his duties as president.”

snip//

“Why does he know so little?” asked Boot. “Because he doesn’t read books or even long articles. ‘I never have,” he proudly told a reporter last year….As president, Trump’s intelligence briefings have been dumbed down, denuded of nuance, and larded with maps and pictures because he can’t be bothered to read a lot of words….The surest indication of how not smart Trump is [is] that he thinks his inability or lack of interest in acquiring knowledge doesn’t matter.”

snip//

“The Power of Dumb” was the headline of an In These Times article in November 2024 by Hamilton Nolan. It’s subhead: “In the Second Trump Era, don’t expect reality to be realistic.”

Nolan wrote: “Grappling with the dawn of the second Trump Era will require an acceptance of the disquieting truth that Dumb Things and Important Things are about to merge into a single excruciating category.”

He continued: “Donald Trump is an ignorant, overconfident, narcissistic, grievance-ridden man—a dumb man, who over time has attracted around him an asteroid field of dumb allies who are but lesser versions of himself. His invariable instinct to act without knowledge is dumb; his unwavering instinct to make consequential decisions based upon minor personal whim is dumb; his unshakeable belief in his own laughable reasoning is dumb. No sober analysis would grant him any benefit of the doubt. He possesses the poisoning combination of great power and the utter absence of concern for responsibility. He knows little and does much.”

Trump, he went on, “is an aggressively ignorant man who doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect him personally. He doesn’t know about issues of consequence and is picking his cabinet based upon who has done the best job of flattering him and who he has seen on television…. It is going to happen much faster than any complex theories can be usefully employed. What is worth thinking deeply about…is how we got there. The fact of the Dumb Tidal Wave is already upon us.”

more...

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/karl-grossman/113513/not-very-bright

[underpants]

1. He doesn't like to be seen wearing his reading glasses

Just a side note

He wore them a bit at the start of the campaign in 2015 but either he or someone decided it made him look old/too smart for MAGA/weak or some mixture of those.

I saw that he had a piece of paper in his hand during an interview/town hall in 2016. People often have pieces of paper in their hand for optics. These had something written on them in very large print probably with a “20/20 pen” which is like a sharpie but it doesn’t bleed through the paper. People with low vision use them to take notes, make lists, etc.