"Smart People Don't Have All The Answers!"
But Stupid People Shouldn't Be President
I used to tell this story because I thought it was funny. Now, I recognize how scary it is.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, an NPR reporter went to a George W. Bush rally and interviewed his supporters. At the time, Gov. Bush had an image of someone who wasn’t the sharpest cactus in the prairie.
“Does it bother you,” the reporter asked, “that people say Bush isn’t very smart?”
“Not really,” the voter replied. “Smart people don’t have all the answers.”
It turns out that George W. Bush was plenty smart enough to manage the job1. At least he understood the deliberative process, consulted advisors, developed informed opinions, asked questions, read briefings and then made the wrong decisions.
Unlike the current occupant.
The Increasingly Essential Peter Baker, who’s been known to use understatement like “unorthodox” and “a shift in standards” to describe Donald Trump, is not only an insightful and engaging reporter, but a fine stylist who knows how to write a lede:
President Trump basked as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised his “willingness to think outside the box.” But when it came to Gaza, Mr. Trump’s thinking on Tuesday was so far outside the box that it was not clear he even knew there was a box.
Baker goes on to describe Trump’s “provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential” comments about a “Riviera of the Middle East,” and an “longterm ownership position” that forcibly displaces the entire population.
(Follow the Guardian’s updates on Trump’s declaration US will ‘take over’ Gaza Strip sparks global condemnation – live)
Peter Baker won’t use the word but we have to. What he alludes to with talk of boxes is a way of getting around the word we need to insert into his reporting for him.
You know the word I mean.
Donald Trump is stone-cold, certifiably stupid. Everyone knows this.
In fact, part of the problem is that not enough people think this is a problem. They knew what was on the label when they voted for him.
“Smart people don’t have all the answers.”
But when you put a stupid person in charge, the rest of us feel the consequences.
The Guardian reports on “Deaths predicted amid the chaos of Elon Musk’s shutdown of USAid,”
Analysis confirms that several thousand women and girls are likely to die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth as a direct result of Trump’s order to freeze aid to the agency for 90 days….One former senior USAid official described Musk’s crackdown as an “extinction-level event” for the international humanitarian sector.
I’ll turn your attention once more to the Tom Davis Dog Food Problem, established by the former Virginia Congressman who said if the Republican Party were a brand of dog food, “they'd take us off the shelf and put us in a landfill." Now it’s both parties, or any belief that voting or politics can make a difference in people’s lives, or should be taken any more seriously than professional wrestling.
All the paths to political victory I’ve been reading about in trusted sources like
, and , and in analysis like this and this, presume that the voters Democrats want to target are interested in buying the dog food in the first place. If they’ve moved on for good—if politics is now a clown show and we don’t mind electing an incompetent, stupid President, our goose is cooked.I don’t think it is, and I’ll have more to say on that next time. Until then, dive into the latest research into the youth vote from CIRCLE.
Young People and the 2024 Election: Struggling, Disconnected, and Dissatisfied
Young people’s electoral participation dropped notably in 2024. After historically high youth voter turnout of over 50% in the 2020 presidential contest, our early estimate is that 42% of youth (ages 18-29) voted in 2024. And after several cycles of overwhelming support for Democratic candidates, exit poll data suggests that young voters supported Vice President Harris over President-elect Trump by just 4 percentage points.
About that dog food…
In the meantime, it’s important to remember—and spread the word—that the word for what Donald Trump is doing isn’t, as Axios is pretending, “bluster,” or “vision,” but crazy, and stupid.
Say it loud! Donald Trump Is Stupid!
(And Proud!)
Although I never shook the image of Will Ferrell in an early SNL skit where he lamented, “I broke the Hoover Dam!”