As “Deep Throat,” the whistleblower who was FBI associate director Mark Felt, tells Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in the film “All the President’s Men” as Woodward unravels the Watergate scandal: “about the White House—the truth is, these are not very bright guys.”
Fifty years later, that is again the truth.
How much of Donald Trump’s directive on U.S. tariffs imposed on nations all over the world—that in recent days has caused a stock market loss of trillions of dollars—is a result of his not being very bright?
The Trump tariffs “are reckless, careless, just plain dumb,” declared U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut after the move last week.
Trump through the years has insisted that he is a “stable genius.”
Through the years, the opposite has been charged.
In 2017, in the first year of the first Trump term as president, Max Boot wrote an article in Foreign Policy magazine headed “Donald Trump Is Proving Too Stupid to Be President.” It began: “The evidence continues to mount that he is far from smart—so far, in fact, that he may not be capable of carrying out his duties as president.”
Boot said “he doesn’t seem to have acquired even the most basic information that a high school student should possess.” Among many examples, “Recall that Trump said that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, was “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job,” and “also claimed that Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War, ‘was really angry that he saw what was happening in regard in regard to the Civil War.’”
“Why does he know so little?” asked Boot. “Because he doesn’t read books or even long articles. ‘I never have,” he proudly told a reporter last year….As president, Trump’s intelligence briefings have been dumbed down, denuded of nuance, and larded with maps and pictures because he can’t be bothered to read a lot of words….The surest indication of how not smart Trump is [is] that he thinks his inability or lack of interest in acquiring knowledge doesn’t matter.”
Trump’s first “administration has been one disaster after another. And those fiascos can be ascribed directly to the president’s lack of intellectual horsepower.”
“The Power of Dumb” was the headline of an In These Times article in November 2024 by Hamilton Nolan. It’s subhead: “In the Second Trump Era, don’t expect reality to be realistic.”
Nolan wrote: “Grappling with the dawn of the second Trump Era will require an acceptance of the disquieting truth that Dumb Things and Important Things are about to merge into a single excruciating category.”
He continued: “Donald Trump is an ignorant, overconfident, narcissistic, grievance-ridden man—a dumb man, who over time has attracted around him an asteroid field of dumb allies who are but lesser versions of himself. His invariable instinct to act without knowledge is dumb; his unwavering instinct to make consequential decisions based upon minor personal whim is dumb; his unshakeable belief in his own laughable reasoning is dumb. No sober analysis would grant him any benefit of the doubt. He possesses the poisoning combination of great power and the utter absence of concern for responsibility. He knows little and does much.”
Trump, he went on, “is an aggressively ignorant man who doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect him personally. He doesn’t know about issues of consequence and is picking his cabinet based upon who has done the best job of flattering him and who he has seen on television….It is going to happen much faster than any complex theories can be usefully employed. What is worth thinking deeply about…is how we got there. The fact of the Dumb Tidal Wave is already upon us.”
“You can’t fix stupid” is a phrase coined by comedian Ron White years ago.
It is highly relevant today.
As to Trump’s history in business, Jessica Dean on CNN last week, as the stock market plummeted following Trump’s tariff directive, noted to her guest, Ross Gerber, co-founder of Gerber Kawaski Wealth Management, that “the White House is saying trust Trump.” Gerber responded: “Wall Street knows Trump’s track record of trusting Trump with business which is bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy….His track record speaks for itself of being drowned in doubt and making horrible business decisions.”
There is a long record of this including the Trump casinos and Trump University.
As Steve Benen reported on MSNBC.com last week, based on an interview of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on The Rachel Maddow Show, that “if Trump is going to set the global economy—and your retirements savings on fire, it’s hardly unreasonable to think he should present his vision in a way that had a tangential relationship with reality. He did not.”
Many Trump claims are cited including how the “United States subsidizes Canada with $200 billion a year” and the U.S. “’took in hundreds of billions of dollars’” from China thanks to tariffs he imposed during his first term” and “Canada ‘imposes a 250-300% tariff on many of our dairy products” and “the Great Depression happened because U.S. officials moved away from tariffs” and the list goes on. And with each claim, Benen writes how it “wasn’t true” and provides elaboration.
“The larger point of course, isn’t just that Trump has a truth allergy,” Benen continued. “Much of the public knew this long before his [tariff announcement] event in the Rose Garden began. Rather, the broader significance is rooted in the fact that the president—reading from prepared text—apparently felt as if he had to lie.”
Joe Conason in a piece on Alternet headlined “The thing that ensures economic catastrophe,” wrote: “Everyone should have known what was about to happen when Donald Trump announced huge global tariffs under the slogan ‘Make America Wealthy Again.’ Like ‘Make America Healthy Again,’ which accompanied the return of deadly measles, the cheery tagline for Trump’s trade war foretold ruin—which has arrived at warp speed.”
“Within hours, the global markets wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth from the balance sheets of retirement accounts and pension plans as well as banks and corporations. What looms ahead is not the ‘boom’ that Trump has predicted but rather a shrinking economy with both stagnating employment and rising prices. Which is precisely the opposite of what he promised voters last year,” he continued.
“To anyone who has observed Trump closely over the course of his career, this catastrophe was predictable as soon as he gained the unchecked sway he now wields in Washington,” he went on. “He is not a ‘stable genius’ with superior genetic endowment, but a spoiled scion of middling intelligence at best. He is not a brilliant negotiator who can conclude the Ukraine war in a single day or bring the Chinese government to heel, but a failed businessman who wrecked his father’s real estate company with bad deals and excessive debt.”
“Having escaped any accountability for the national destruction incurred during his first presidential term—from the mismanaged pandemic that cost a million lives to the violent coup attempt of Jan. 6, 2021—he has returned to the White House with even greater arrogance, courtesy of the Supreme Court. Secure in power, he is delivering an extremely painful lesson in the consequences of ignorance and incompetence run amok.”
“Those dismal qualities were instantly on display in every aspect of the tariff rollout, as neither the president nor his phalanx of flunkies could offer any plausible rationale of his actions beyond sloganeering,” wrote Conason.
“Why is the United States seeking to punish its traditional allies in Europe? Why are we penalizing our best trading partners in Canada and Mexico? Why are we imposing trade barriers on tiny countries like Lesotho and remote islands uninhabited by human beings? (We may yet see how brilliantly Trump negotiates with penguins.) And how did Trump formulate the cardboard list of nations and tariffs he brandished as a prop at his “Liberation Day” announcement?” he asked. “The White House could offer no coherent response to these puzzling questions, which drew contradictory answers from everyone around Trump, as well as the president himself, or no answers at all.”
These, indeed, “are not very bright guys.”
And you can’t fix stupid.
We desperately need alternatives as soon as possible.
