Trump likes to portray himself as having achieved (and continuing to achieve) things that no mere mortal could ever have done. In one sense, he is right: he is the stupidest, most ignorant, most incompetent person ever to become a dictator.
I thought about this today after reading this Huffington Post story by S. V. Date: Maybe Rex Tillerson Was Right. Maybe Donald Trump Really Is Just A Moron.
Date starts with Trump’s action a few days into his second term, when he ordered stored water to be released into California’s Central Valley, from where, in his addled mind, it would miraculously ascend the mountains and put out the fires in Los Angeles (and he still thinks that is exactly what happened. Oh — the water came from Canada, too. In fact (1) the fires were already out, and, (2) the water was intended for crop irrigation and all it did was soak into the ground near where it was released.)
This is not just a sign of dementia; Trump has always acted this way. He gets an idea, from some friend or passing internet guy or for all we know a comic book, and once it’s implemented in his head, he will never let it go. No fact, and especially no expert, can convince him otherwise. In Rex Tillerson’s infamous description (which he has never denied), he is a “fucking moron.”
Another person who was once close to Trump, who somehow escaped his constant demands for NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), says much the same.
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”
This is, as far as I know, unprecedented in the history of leaders who turn themselves in autocrats. Those who have risen to power on their own, who have seized and stolen power, may have been possessed of an understanding of the world not entirely in accord with reality. But none have ever been so far removed from the real world, and so unwilling to correct their mistakes as is Trump. Trump is truly uniquely stupid.
But wait, there’s more.
“It’s a psychopath’s emotional intelligence,” [George] Conway said. “He can smell fear, and he can smell whether people are complying. He’s not intelligent in the sense that he absorbs information.”
One of the few places where Trump is not stupid is in his ability to spot and stroke fear. In this, at any rate, he either knows instinctively what all successful dictators know or he has learned from them. (Which would mean he is not totally incapable of learning, I suppose.)
Trump shares other autocratic traits:
- Overweening narcissism
- Total lack of empathy
- Grandiosity
- Belief that he knows more than all the experts (the Dunning-Kruger effect; Date quotes Dunning in his article)
There are surely some others; feel free to add to the list in the comments. But one trait unique to Trump, especially to this degree, is his lifelong stupidity. He really is a fucking moron.
There is another, even more puzzling, trait that no other self-made autocrat could possibly share: his incompetence. Dictators rise to power by clever manipulation, by leading a military coup, by subtle, careful, long-range planning. None of that even remotely describes Trump. It does describe the GOP in the years leading up to 2016; their leaders had skipped the military coup part (though I wonder what traps have been laid), but they had inched their way over the decades (with a lot of help from Democratic inertia) preparing to take over. Then Trump muscled his way in and stole all their work. He did it at first because no one believed he had a chance, and then later because he used his true talent: fear.
Trump’s profound stupidity not only magnifies his incompetence, it makes him a pathetically easy target for manipulation, from Putin to Thiel to Musk (for a while) to even our nominal allies. In one sense, it doesn’t matter if Putin has kompromat on Trump; he just has to have Trump, period.
Richard Nixon is the closest we’ve come to having an autocrat in the US since we got rid of the British monarchy. But he was never stupid, never detached from reality. He worked his way up to the position of president, and ultimately the system worked well enough to bring him down.
Other nations have much more experience with autocrats, even stupid ones; Tsar Nicholas II, John of England (who was probably more arrogant than stupid, though it came to the same result), and so on. The United States is, as the propagandists like to say, unique: Never in history has a profoundly stupid person managed to seize the reins of power and turn himself into an autocrat.
Even MAGA is starting to catch on. Trump’s Unforgivable Sin:
Americans already understood Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves willing to tolerate that. But now they are coming to believe that he is inept. In American politics, that is an unforgivable sin.
No “maybe” about it; he is a moron. We need to harp on that, as well as doing other things such as Newsom’s hysterically accurate trolling, in our campaign to restore our democracy.