[supjeff]

How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy. as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him.

[JumpCrisscross]

> How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"?

Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)

[AngryData]

What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? All the reports from people who knew him personally had very low regard for his intellegence, and that is even before taking into account his repeated public blunders.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life?

The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.)

[direwolf20]

Did he manoeuvre himself, or did some other guy manoeuvre him so that guy could stay relatively hidden?

[scarecrowbob]

My assumption was that he didn't even intend to win the 2016 election but the ability to launder dark money is so appealing that his avarice combined with the sheer unlikability of HRC to create a perfect storm to blow him out of Florida.

[scarecrowbob]

That's certainly closer to my understanding of the guy. He really doesn't feel "smart" in any of the usual sense of the term.

It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world.

Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime".

Yeah, that -screams- competence.

[mynameisash]

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart.

I'll grant that he has achieved success via some amount of cunning (often via threats), but "smart" is decidedly not a term I would ever apply to him, and I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably think this given the myriad facts otherwise.

[protocolture]

Donald Trump is cunning, but you wouldn't make a Fox president either, it would just screech and shit all over the oval office too.

[red-iron-pine]

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart.

wut. this is a joke, right?

Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools.

[JumpCrisscross]

> wut. this is a joke, right?

No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists.

I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.

[myvoiceismypass]

> recall the Republican debates

From literally a decade ago?

[adventured]

The bumbling dope is the default go-to characterization by the left, they always target intelligence first no matter what.

Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.

The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that.

How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction.

[reverius42]

> They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter

I sure hope all US Presidents are smarter than the typical voter. I think we're comparing presidents to other presidents, not to the typical voter.

[amalcon]

I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly, dude was wrong and/or lying about a lot of stuff but he wasn't dumb), and Trump, sure.

The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.

[scarecrowbob]

A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't understand why those norms are in place.

I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.

At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":

he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.

In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.

And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.

Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.

[gardenhedge]

Bill Clinton who got caught in a sex scandal... smart?

[9x39]

And Noam Chomsky was deeply connected to JE and his island, which is a significantly larger scandal.

The point is that intelligence is orthogonal to, say, lust or many other trappings of power.

[gosub100]

The wicked smart people are the ones who created and honed the right/left divide in the US. Trump is an avatar of one extreme that manipulated people wanted.

[esseph]

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart

This is the exact opposite of what has been said about Trump by his "friends" in the Epstein files.

[CaptWillard]

His "friends" like Reid Hoffman and Epstein himself? They do talk about Trump a lot in those files.

[esseph]

There's about half a dozen or more comments about Trump's lack of intelligence or inability to focus from Epstein, Bannon, etc.

[kashunstva]

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart.

I highly doubt that. Certainly not in any conventional sense of the word. A former professor of his at the Wharton School characterized him as the “dumbest student he ever taught.”

More objectively, linguistic studies have demonstrated a considerable decline in the complexity and scope of his language. And recently while trying to defend himself against claims of cognitive decline, he could not recall the term “Alzheimer’s”, instead tapping himself on the head until an aide filled in the word for him.

[stonogo]

ah yes, a wickedly smart man who appoints an idiot as secretary of defense. completely consistent analysis here

[wat10000]

I frequently see people saying that Trump is great, but he's let down by those around him. As if he didn't put them all there.

In any case, all you have to do is listen to the man talk. If you can hit stop before your brains start leaking onto the floor, the conclusion is inescapable.

For most of his life he did nothing that would require any sort of smarts. Becoming POTUS was quite an accomplishment, but he lucked into it. He happened to have a style and set of opinions that appealed to a large group of voters. He's charismatic in an empty sort of way that still works on a lot of people. He had a pretty pathetic set of opponents both in the primaries and the general. And he just barely won. Nothing in his campaign was shrewdly designed, he was just doing what he does, and it happened to work.

Birth him into an ordinary family instead of a rich one and he's going to be a used car salesman griping about getting bumped into the next tax bracket when he makes too many sales.

[tokyobreakfast]

People—especially the squares in this business—tend to mistake his unfamiliar blue-collar New Yorker manner of speech at face value and don't bother to look deeper.

[notahacker]

Or they look deeper and note that the folksy bragging about pretty basic and irrelevant misunderstandings continues into the minutes of meetings his base that laps that stuff up doesn't bother paying attention to, where there isn't any strategic value to dissembling or being mildly irritating to the apolitical CEOs he's supposed to be giving bland assurances to, and conclude the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes. There are, of course, smart and well connected people that want someone whose extraordinary talent is being the centre of attention occupying the centre of attention.

[exe34]

It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history.

[simonh]

What were getting is another Russia with the full military and economic might of the US.

[direwolf20]

A number that is soon to approach zero, everyone hopes.

It could happen. The world is dedollarizing as a direct consequence of the trade war.

[red-iron-pine]

and a demonstrated willingness to use it -- e.g. Venezuela

[georgemcbay]

> It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world.

I realize this is kind of a joke, but...

The US will continue to be the most powerful military in history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom and power to push back on the president's worst impulses.

Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to put much of a dent in our current military spending (which they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia...

On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-WW II world order.

On the current Trump path the world is going to get far more dangerous and chaotic, not less.

[wat10000]

What's really fun is that conventional weapons can protect you from a crazy aggressor if you're strong enough, but nuclear weapons may not. They only act as a deterrent, so they require your enemy to believe you'll use them, believe that they can't destroy all of them before you use them, and understand the horrible consequences of retaliation.

I get the impression that Trump is pretty negative on nuclear weapons and I don't think he'd do something that could provoke nuclear retaliation. But I doubt he'll be our last mad king. I think the odds are pretty high of at least a small nuclear war within my lifetime. Even if the US keeps it together, proliferation means much higher odds of some idiot leader somewhere pressing the Button.

[direwolf20]

What happens if the US economy collapses and it can't muster the equivalent of 1.5 trillion of today's dollars at any price?

[georgemcbay]

We may find out.

But I'm pretty certain that outcome also wouldn't be a net positive for the rest of the world in the short or medium term. Very little of the rest of the world is insulated from the US economy.

[exe34]

I'll get to experience my 4th once-in-a-lifetime wealth transfer from my generation to the ultra-wealthy as a millennial.