[narrator]

Think about the number of times that Donald Trump got called stupid starting from when he launched his presidential campaign. You may hate the guy's politics, but he is objectively not dumb, but the "bad people are dumb, smart people are good" narrative must be reinforced relentlessly. It's the golden hammer of political propaganda because IT WORKS!

The counter for Donald Trump being stupid is that Greta Thurnberg is smart and good and everyone must listen to her and do what she says when she is at best very average.

[astrange]

Trump historically hasn’t been stupid, but that doesn’t mean much in the present. Age gets everyone and his frontal cortex doesn’t exactly seem in shape.

Beyond his usual behavior of believing the last thing anyone told him, when you let him in front of kids he tells them Santa isn’t real, he gave a bunch of Boy Scouts an unrehearsed speech mostly anecdotes about high society parties he went to as a kid in NYC… is that “smart”?

(Also, after he got hospitalized for covid, it was notable he kept bragging in public that he’d passed a dementia test.)

[edgyquant]

Both Bush Jr and Trump actively played dumb as political theater. That is not the same as the narrative switching to Elon being dumb (and totally not even an engineer, can’t even code lol) the second it became clear he held right wing opinions and planned to act on them.