this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
1351 points (98.3% liked)
Bluesky
1387 readers
244 users here now
People skeeting stuff.
Bluesky Social is a microblogging social platform being developed in conjunction with the decentralized AT Protocol. Previously invite-only, the flagship Beta app went public in February 2024. All are welcome!
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Totally agree.
I think he had a very common liberal, capitalism-sized blind spot. I'm willing to admit I had the same one at the time. He also was definitely beholden to interests and was 0% of the communist / socialist that everyone continually pretended (and still pretends) he was.
One of his team of lackeys presented him the annotated photograph and he confused it with reality. He's oceans worth of stupid and there are countless examples of this.
I mean, back in his first term he put up a table full of blank paper and made a photo-op of it, claiming it was all the regulations he planned to undo.
"Trump didn't realize he was standing at a table full of blank paper" is a quick jab at his intelligence. But the reality was merely that Trump used a prop to sell a lie that played well with his base. And the photo-shopped knuckle tattoos were another prop to sell another lie.
Was it as cleverly rolled out and executed as the Killian documents that brought down Dan Rather or the Aluminum Tubes video that gulled Congress into war with Iraq? No. But it didn't need to be. We're getting the same results regardless of the fidelity of the image.
He got Congress to sign off on a $145B increase to the ICE budget by leveraging AI generated smears. That's not what I'd call stupid.
His base is stupid too. We've already been over this. 🥱
It wasn't mearly photoshopped. It was annotated. He insisted that the 20pt Arial annotations were actually tattoos.
If you want to believe he's some type of genius, it's clear I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise. So I'll man woman person TV camera see my way out. Covfefe!
His base has been indoctrinated over a lifetime to believe white nationalist propaganda. The Republican Party has been flirting with white nationalists since... well... Rutherford B. Hayes. But not since McKinley have they ever delivered on Trump's scale.
They don't care that the image is fake, either. They just want thirty years of "the brown people are invading, we have to fight back!" to pay off.
Almost as though its value was in propaganda rather than fact.
The national humiliation that accompanies Trump's rise is that he is clearly and painfully stupid and that it does not matter.
He telegraphs his movements. He loudly announces all of his intentions. It does not matter, because the game is rigged.
It's not isolated to Trump. Every business idiot in the last quarter century has gotten this type of treatment (https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/) despite the fact that they continually promise vague bullshit and cannot even deliver upon that.
America is a place where we tell ourselves that the "American Dream" is a real possibility, despite all of the contrary evidence. We write whole tomes based upon the supposition of "meritocracy" in a country where it is amongst the least likely to be true. Class mobility in the United States has been less possible decade after decade for the last half-century and the yet this type of "rise and grind" mythology has become even more popular. (I think these types of paradoxical phenomena are everywhere you look in America, but that's a completely different discussion.)
The idea of the powerful, rich, famous, or the grand trifecta being complete fucking dunderheads that Peter principle their way into further destroying any justice or good works of our country on the backs of their own greed is something that is too painful for most people to fathom, but it's nonetheless true.
He's stupid. It doesn't matter that he's stupid. In fact, it's better for the forces that are trying to accomplish real goals that he is stupid. He distracts us from the boundlessly evil ghouls who would not win an election themselves, but are vicious, ruthless, and competent.
That's WWE rules. It only looks "stupid" because it is intended as a spectacle rather than a sport. Turning around to showboat to the crowd so your opponent can get behind you and hit you with a steel chair looks really dumb, until you realize its all just part of the show.
We're living in a system that rewards sales and marketing at the expense of any material results. Calling some of the best sales and marketing guys in the country "stupid" because they're selling saline and snake oil only makes sense if you're rating them on their efficacy rather than their sales volume.
He's one of the most successful propagandists and public speakers in a generation. He's pulled himself out of bankruptcy over and over again, in large part thanks to his skill at manipulating peers into lending him more money when the long line of creditors he's fucked over is practically urban legend. He's known exactly who to make friends with in order to advance his career, straight from NYC real estate failson to crime family money laundering machine to political money-laundering mega-donor to Epstein confidant to FOX News special guest to GOP nominee, beating out dozens of professional politicians on his way to the top.
The fact that he's rope-a-doped so many other political and business peers would suggest he's more competent than anyone wants to credit. The fact that he's repeatedly said how much he loved Mussolini, executed the Mussolini playbook practically down to the letter, and still left liberals second-guessing his skills when they had him dead-to-rights in between '21 and '25, suggests he's just smart enough to be a two-term President.
Which marks him out as smarter than all the folks who lost to him along the way.
Sometimes it isn't even their sales volume. Look at the numbers on AI. As the podcast crowd would say "the math doesn't math". It doesn't matter because those evaluating them are also a combination of stupid and complicit.
You keep insisting that winning an election means you're "smarter" than the opponent. There is absolutely zero evidence to support your claim.
Also, by your own weird equating of intelligence and electoral results then Joe Biden is smarter than Donald Trump and you already said that he's stupid.
They're pushing it out relentlessly. I don't think you can fault anyone for lack of name recognition or (initial) adoption. The numbers don't make sense for revenue, but this is hardly the first time a tech company has been underwater for a decade before coming out as a profit squeezing giant.
They're also in sales. The big news media periodicals are fully just Native Ads now.
People who are exceptional at their jobs are traditionally described as "Smart", at least within their fields.
A claim I heard endlessly in '21. He was the only guy skilled enough to beat Trump, which is why everyone else had to drop out and clear the way during the '20 primary. Also, why he refused to step down during the '24 primary.
It might have held up, if he hadn't flubbed it and dropped out after one bad debate.
Yep, complicit.
He's not exceptional at his job either. His job isn't to get elected and he even flubbed that in 2020. It's also not to develop and nurture a cult of personality. If you're talking about enriching himself, and you think that's the primary or sole job of a politician...then sure? I think other people had traits that prevented them from becoming a full-on kleptocrats, and more broadly speaking I don't think most people would think the job of a politician is solely to enrich themselves.
So you potentially buy that Biden is smarter than Trump because he beat Trump in 2020, that Biden is stupid, and yet somehow Trump is not stupid?
LOL, man, what are you trying to even discuss here?
Look, it's possible to not succeed at achieving your goals (whatever they may be) for garden variety of reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence.
Trump is incessant, persistent, relentless, ruthless, unscrupulous, hedonistic, impulsive, a pathological liar, shameless, immoral, bought and paid for, and would be nihilistic if he weren't so narcissistic.
There are a large amount of very smart dorks that have impediments (that have largely nothing to do with intelligence) that prevent them from achieving their objectives.
There are also people who have actual values and do not believe in continually violating them in order to achieve whatever their objective may be. If you think that's stupid, that's like your opinion, man. But I wouldn't go around shooting people to succeed in my job goals, even if it would make me successful at achieving them.
He's won the Presidency twice and he's forced the opposition party to make enormous concessions to his ideological end goals both times.
It is to get elected and to get allies elected. And now he's President again with a Congress even more MAGA-pilled than in 2016.
A system's purpose is what it does, and it sure looks like the thing elected offices do is enrich their office-holders. So in that sense, he's done a stellar job.
If you go back up to the very tippy top, I'm noting how "stupid" gets flung around as a pejorative, which inevitably leads opposition groups to underestimate people and play into their hands.
Reagan, Bush, and Trump have all been excellent instances of this. Hell, Clinton, too (Bush Sr had him pegged as a know-nothing hick). Obama as well, if you consider how Hillary got fleeced in the primary.
Values like "Greed is Good", "AIs are superior to humans", and "Israelis are entitled to a militant ethno-nationalist enclave state". They're the ones currently running the country.
There are some very, very good poker players who cannot tell you the name of the state they took all your money in, because they could not be bothered to learn the name.
It is asinine to insist they are stupid and you are smart when you're the one wearing the barrel-with-suspenders.
You may like this quip, and I'll admit I'm partial to it myself, but it's just a quip. A system can have other purported or actual purposes and then simply not be structured correctly to reach them. The quip is skeptical and cynical, but not everyone is a cynic, and not all non-cynical people are stupid.
Great? The values espoused or imposed by the currently ruling regime aren't universally shared even in fully developed totalitarian states.
A better analogy is if there was a poker player that came into the game with more chips than any other player at the table, was allowed to continually and openly cheat and evade the established rules of the game, and was still crowned the winner. Is that player possibly stupid? Yes, it very easily could be the case that he is.
Trump's chief insight in his entire life is that the people who enforce the rules in this country are weak-willed and will fold under applied pressure. That's not exactly theory of relativity stuff, and many other people knew this just as well as Trump but were restrained by other things that don't apply to Trump from exploiting it.