He Is
Even Dumber Than We Thought
Four years in office have only
convinced more Americans that the Trump might not be a stable genius.
A Washington Post–ABC News poll taken the last week of
May 2020 asked Americans, “Do you think Trump has the mental sharpness it takes
to serve effectively as president?” Fifty-two percent of respondents said no,
with only 46 percent saying yes.
One
might see this solid majority response as the weary, off-the-cuff judgment of
an American public worn down by Trump’s barrage of outlandish claims about
coronavirus treatments, or fantasized accounts of legions of violent antifa
leaders orchestrating the present nationwide protests over the police killing
of George Floyd. (Indeed, since that poll’s release, it was reported that Trump mistakenly tried to register to
vote in his newly adopted home state of Florida using an
out-of-state address.) But in truth, this was far from the first poll to find
that a substantial number of Americans see Trump as not very bright. An Economist/YouGov poll in 2019 asked,
“Compared to other presidents since World War II, would you say that Trump is
more or less intelligent?” Forty-seven percent said that he is less
intelligent, 22 percent said he has about the same intelligence, and just 21
percent thought he is more intelligent.
It
appears that Trump’s performance in office has had a negative effect on
perceptions of his mental acuity. The Quinnipiac poll tracked perceptions of
Trump’s mental sharpness from 2016 through 2018, asking, “Would you say that
Donald Trump is intelligent, or not?” When first asked in November 2016, 74
percent of people said yes, and only 21 percent said no. A year later,
however, those answering in the affirmative had fallen to 55 percent, while
those in the negative camp rose to 41 percent. Subsequent polls found roughly
the same ratio.
Closely
related to doubts about Trump’s intelligence is the question of whether he is
too ignorant to do his job. In 2016 and 2017, the Fox News pollasked
people, “Do you think Trump has the knowledge to serve effectively as
president?” In the five times the question was asked, 60 percent of people said
no and just 40 percent or fewer said yes.
Further
evidence that Trump is widely viewed as something shy of the sharpest knife in
the drawer comes from another, far-from-leading query pollsters have posed
about him. In September 2017, a Washington Post–ABC News poll asked people an
open-ended question: “What one word best describes your impression of Trump?
Just the one word that best describes him?” The first most common term to
describe him was “incompetent.” Other related characterizations in the top 10
descriptors included “idiot,” “ignorant,” and “unqualified.”
Quinnipiac
asked a similar question in December 2017: “What is the first word that comes
to mind when you think of President Trump?” By far, the most frequent word that
came to mind was “idiot.” Other common terms included “incompetent,” “moron,”
“ignorant,” and “stupid.”
Of
course, Trump regularly refers to himself as a “very stable genius.”
As proof, he often mentions that he got an undergraduate degree from the
prestigious Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, after
spending his first two years at Fordham.
However, there is no evidence that he was anything other than an ordinary
student. He didn’t make the list of matriculating students in his
class who graduated with honors. Reportedly, one of
his professors, William T. Kelly, later disparaged Trump as one of the dumbest
students he ever had.
There
is no evidence that Trump has ever sought the company of intellectuals or taken
any advice even from those of a conservative persuasion. It’s absurd to imagine
him hosting a dinner for 49 Nobel Prize winners, as John F. Kennedy did in 1962.
(On that occasion, Kennedy said, “I
think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge,
that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible
exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”)
Instead
of touting knowledge for knowledge’s sake, Trump has leaned into a different
model of intellectual achievement, one that falls under the broad heading of
the familiar taunt, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” Throughout his
career, Trump has maintained that the proof of his smarts was in his
fortune—that his early ascension to billionaire status reflected superior
worldly wisdom across the board. This is a long-standing article of faith in
American business folklore—the notion that great wealth and the
conspicuous consumption that accompanies it confer, by definition, an
important benefit to society. Trump contributes to this belief by implying that he is a self-made man, rather than someone who inherited the vast bulk of his
wealth. He also grossly inflates his net worthand downplays the extent to which it was achieved through inside connections and tax
breaks rather than entrepreneurial skill. (In fact, Trump would
have made more money investing his inheritance in a passive index fund than using it to finance his real estate empire.)
From
the earliest days of his
administration, it has been obvious to everyone who has come in
direct contact with him that Trump knows very, very little about any policy
issue or even how the federal government
operates. Among those most alarmed by Trump’s ignorance and
incompetence were those in the military and intelligence community.
After a National Security Council meeting on January 19, 2018, Defense
Secretary James Mattis told aides that Trump had the understanding of “a fifth-
or sixth-grader.”
To
this day, Trump pays very little attention to his
intelligence briefings. He received repeated warnings about the coronavirus that he completely ignored—at great cost in terms of lives.
Long after the seriousness of the pandemic became too serious for him to ignore
and after many briefings on the subject, Trump continued to make ridiculous
comments about unproven cures,
including some that are simply nonsensical.
Trump’s
mental failings are also painfully clear to foreign diplomats, who are
professionally obligated to be frank and clear-eyed about him. Among
themselves, diplomats early on shared tips on meeting with
Trump: Don’t assume he knows anything about your country, flatter
his ego, and be mindful of his extremely short attention span. It often
appeared to aides that Trump didn’t even understand that other countries are in different time zones.
He quickly became a “laughing stock,” as one unnamed official put it, at
international meetings, where diplomats mocked his ignorance and
limited vocabulary.
In
2017, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Sir Kim Darroch, harshly
assessed Trump’s intelligence and ability to function in office. In a cable to the Foreign Office,
Darroch said, “As seen from here, we really don’t believe that this
administration is going to become substantially more normal, less
dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction-driven, less diplomatically
clumsy and inept.”
When
the French ambassador, Gérard Araud, left his post in 2019, he blasted Trump, comparing him to King Louis XIV:
“You have an old king, a bit whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed, but he wants
to be the one deciding.”
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel was despondent at the 2017 G7 meeting, where Trump showed
no awareness of climate change and rejected international cooperation to deal
with it. According to Der Spiegel,
“His speech was a break from centuries of Enlightenment and rationality. The
president presented his political statement as a nationalist manifesto of the
most imbecilic variety. It couldn’t have been any worse. His speech was packed
with make-believe numbers from controversial or disproven studies. It was
hypocritical and dishonest.”
In
July 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” for his bungling and incompetence. That same month,
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly dismissed Trump as an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a
“kindergartner” at a private dinner. In 2018, White House chief of staff John
Kelly called Trump “an idiot” on
several occasions. A long list of other close Trump advisers have also disparaged his
intelligence.
Nevertheless,
throughout all his screwups, Trump has maintained fanatical support among
Republicans. Yet occasionally a dissenting view will leak through, again
exposing a harrowing view of the world’s most powerful man as he really is. On
October 8, 2017, Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee tweeted: “It’s a
shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously
missed their shift this morning.”
Republicans
are not blind to Trump’s shortcomings, although blind partisan loyalty
generally keeps them on message in public, reserving their honest opinions to
whispered comments behind closed doors. One who went public, however, was Erick
Erickson, a former CEO of the popular Redstate.com website, a Republican hangout. In a rare moment of
candor, he wrote in 2017:
“The
president exudes incompetence and instability. Divulging classified information
to the Russians through bragging; undermining his staff’s defense of his
conduct through inane tweets; even reportedly asking the FBI director to
suspend an investigation of a former adviser—all these strike me not so much as
malicious but as the ignorant actions of an overwhelmed man. Republicans excuse
this behavior as Trump being Trump, but that will only embolden voters who seek
greater accountability to choose further change over stability. The sad reality
is that the greatest defense of the president available at this point is one
his team could never give on the record: He is an idiot who does not know any
better.”
And
that’s the assessment of an ideological fellow traveler; as the polling results
and unvarnished assessments of global diplomats suggest that the president is
not merely “overwhelmed” and that the idiot defense for his chronic
incompetence and misconduct is more than a simply rhetorical tactic. With the
Trump presidency, H.L. Mencken’s 1920 prediction that one day the White House “will be adorned by a
downright moron” has now come true.