Will America learn enough lessons from surviving the predictable, amplifying self-implosion of two unqualified, ruling class schemers elected by gullible, greater fools?
Some days enlightenment, indeed stunning revelations of tragic, laughable modern times, pop up when tracking otherwise mundane quotations. Per Meidas’ Ron Filipkowki and his June 18 daily review:
JD Vance has started doing podcast interviews [to pitch] his new book on religion: “Trump is super smart. He reads a lot. He understands people at an instinctual level better than anybody I’ve ever known. He is a very, very—just from a pure IQ perspective—a very smart person. If you gave Trump an IQ test with the other 45 or 46 presidents that the US has had, I guarantee he’d be either near the top or at the top.”
Against this multitudinous Vance malarky, here’s a reality-based term from the Yale School of Management:
An IQ (Intelligence Quotient) test is a standardized assessment designed to measure cognitive abilities, particularly abstract reasoning, logic, and problem-solving skills. . . . tests measure the capacity to learn, adapt, and process new information.
First, logic: who trusts a servile lackey to gauge a tyrannical boss’ prowess, with a laughable “guarantee” about “super” intelligence (without one example)? So, if IQ informs leadership, what’s DT’s quotient? Second, credibility. To contrive that Trump “reads a lot” when all the world (and DT) confirm the exact opposite outs JD as a clownish, ass-kissing prattler. That DT doesn’t read (or evince book learning) invalidates JD as judge of anyone’s brain power, instead the lying propagandist who digs his own hole. Third, evidence, Whatever DT’s IQ, this self-consuming fantasy contradicts the nearly global conviction Trump isn’t only a decidedly doltish dullard, but way out of his depth whatever the topic. Except as court herald (or court jester). Fourth, terms. While Trump displays an “instinctual” nose for unearthing marks, when has “instinct” (like gut impulse or animal reflex), sustained leadership. Root of “instinct” is (in) steig, meaning “to prick, stick, or pierce” – prodding a lazy animal. Is Vance so blindly loyal not to know gut instinct invokes primitive, reptilian brain functions, not knowledge-based, problem-solving reason?
Fifth, the logical fallacy of false, deceitful comparisons Only the dimmest defender meaninglessly compares his boss to leaders before IQ tests, let alone assert “near or at the top.” As an evidence-free category, how would anyone know? Item: Trump’s daily online sputterings contradict “IQ intelligence” by lashing out with extreme pettiness, proving himself an obsessed, closed-minded a-hole past his pull date. Thus, Vance’s bogus hyperbole logically convicts two top officials as unhinged boobs. Policy ignorance merged with folly is on full public display: 1) tariff madness, 2) election denial, 3) inflation drivers, 4) the idiocy boomerang from attacking Iran plus needlessly haranguing historic allies, 5) war on knowledge and science, whether vaccines, climate change, or medical breakthroughs, 6) and the absurd, unproved equation between high IQ with competent, successful, law-supporting leadership. High IQ types get regularly dinged because specialty expertise hardly correlates with equitably running a government of, for and by the people.
Forrest Gump simple (or regular types like Eisenhower, Ford, or Biden) are functional presidents by leveraging experience, knowledge and staff quality to favor justice, social cohesion and get things done. Or one can be brainy technocrats like Hoover, even Nixon, producing serial, ruinous blunders. When real-world outcomes are tallied, the maligned Biden appears genius-like while Trump-Vance, one calamity after another, invoke epic failures like James Buchanan (who graduated college with honors, passed the bar, served in the House and Senate, was ambassador to Russia and Sec’y of State before his doomed presidency, squeezed to smithereens by looming Civil War pressure-cookers).
Trump post: “These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid.”Beware of incompetent, self-verifying pudding heads who distract by lambasting critics not as wrong or misinformed but jealous, stupid (!) and immoral (often treasonous). The blatant logical fallacies (name-calling, distraction slander, mixing categories ) reinforce the vacuous inanity.
Trump post: If [Iran truce] works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.” Beware of dishonest clowns so desperate they not only sense disaster (what else?), but already target scapegoats (here, an Iran war skeptic). Irony compounds bad faith. Malignant narcissists readily suck up credit for success, but dish out tasteless “jokes” as craven insurance (before disowning all “failed” lackeys).
When asked if Trump’s dig worries Vance, his knee-jerk reply: “Not at all. I think the president was joking.” Beware sleazy schemers writing off truthiness as mere “jokes,” the first, most blatant smokescreen. Only fools and out of touch dictator wannabes can’t separate true threats from genuinely malicious “jokes.” Even were Trump only being sarcastic (or stupid), what shows Vance smart enough to escape his abject finale?
Apt response by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) to NOTUS: “It wasn’t a joke.” If rightwing insider Cornyn, Trump-dumped for fellow convict and gaga MAGA primitive Paxton, doesn’t know the truth – Trump is a very nasty piece of work – who does? Cornyn uses one word to prove Vance a liar and Trump a vicious manipulator, underlining MAGA Trump lying machine that wars against citizens, world stability, planetary health, and its own future. Now that’s really stupid. Political intelligence isn’t about speedily solving verbal or math quizzes, even knowing logic or concepts, but recognizing essential variables, assessing where opportunity lurks, then making the most pragmatic, defensible choices. Stupidity is not knowing how to govern, committing irreparable blunders, then doubling down by defensively impugning “bad people.”
Finally, from Aaron Parnas’ report, the rash of Trump solipsism never ends: According to The Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump repeatedly responds to aides, advisers, and Republican allies who question his decisions with a simple refrain: “I’m the president and you’re not.” A torpedo to intelligence is asserting that your power position alone (now rebuked as illegitimate by a majority) refutes all criticism, all misjudgments, all public disgust with egotistic mayhem. Does it matter whether unfitness, senility, insularity, bad education or defective brain power explain deviance? The ultimate proof of stupidity is its wide range, whether economic, diplomatic, military, scientific or political. No measurable, real-world outcomes prove Trumpism even close to being qualified, though chronic blunders do distill exactly who Trump is.
The horror for all but hardcore MAGA is no longer whether Trump is stupid, ignorant, senile and/or fixated, even locked into failed “instinctual” responses to befuddling complexity. What matters is the damage done from MAGA recklessness before being defanged, decommissioned, impeached or exiled. That Vance, perhaps less stupid or close-minded, is the alternative means the MAGA idiocracy is not over.
Eventually, for marginal democracy to survive, sane adults will have to confront what’s broken, including all the creaky Constitutional vulnerabilities on full display. It takes no genius to know the sooner reparation begins, the better; ditto, the longer reality and sanity are held at bay, the greater the price for all of us, even a few oligarchs going down with the Trump shipwreck.
P.S. Trump sounded off on Axios, declaring with divine intonation “no limits” to his power (except for Iran? Or Israel? Or Putin?). As CNN host Pamela Brown noted, derangement makes him think “he’s more powerful than some of history’s most brutal dictators like Hitler and Stalin.” Despite Iran, Israel, Russia? Liking dictators is not enough, and the midterm will burst his increasingly delusional bubble wide open. The world will vote down Trump’s (and Vance’s) withered, blinkered noggins – clearly beyond redemption or alteration.
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