“Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that ‘nobody’ showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” he added. “If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’”
[…]
“This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about,” he said of Trump’s campaign falsehoods. “This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.”
Except for the “Trump is not stupid” part.
Stupid is a stupid does, and smart is just the ability to efficiently accomplish your objectives with the resources available to you.
I would argue that Trump is smart in that he has managed to, with limited intellectual, strategic, or character resources pull off one of the largest con jobs in American history.
He doesn’t want to do good for America, he wants to do good for himself and has achieved heretofore not possible levels of graft and extortion and all of this without facing any real consequences himself.
He’s not a good man, He’s not an intelligent man, but he is a smart monster. He not an imbecile, he’s not witless, but he is a stupid business man.
Trump proves that you can be stupid and smart at the same time because they can apply to different qualities of a person.
He is undeniably a bad American.
True. I’d qualify him as more manipulative than intelligent though, but I guess you can be smart at being manipulative. I’m not sure he’s even that because he’s just been afforded every opportunity in his life to take the most advantage of being manipulative so if he was not a millionaire by birth, I don’t think he would be anywhere near as good at it.
He’s good at subconsciously transmitting divisive/extremist messages with such “genuine innocence/ignorance” (not sure about this word, but he seems to be genuinely unaware of when he is lying) that other susceptible people absorb subconsciously too. It does not go through the rational part of the brain, so this is not about being stupid, being stupid probably helps him be genuine when he makes the most blatant lies, unlike JD.
He was born rich, all the stuff he does is because he got started on third base and even then lost it all.
His saving grace was him being entertaining, not intelligent.
You don’t give him enough credit.
He didn’t just lose it all, until the presidential graft, he had lost a couple orders of magnitude more money than the substantial fortune he inherited.
Read about his past, he lost it all and then made the apprentice which he only could do because he was famous.
…and he only got that job because of how hard up for cash he was after somehow managing to lose money on a casino.
In the world of business Donald Trump is boldly pioneering the frontier of incompetence.
Lots of people are saying it. Everyday someone comes to me to say Donald Trump is an amazing loser of money. Big strong men come to me in tears saying No one can lose money quite as confidently as Trump, (with the possible exceptions of Cathie Woods and Elon Musk).
There is a difference between intelligence and low cunning.
Trump has the latter, not the former.