Re: My personal difficulty with Mr. Trump's statements --
By all accounts Trump is not stupid
Have a citation for that? Like, as in a reliable source?
Nothing in Trump's history suggests to me that he possesses more than a sort of unremarkable cunning. He has a small collection of behaviors which he repeats with little variation. They have worked well for him because he started from a position of advantage; because he's a useful idiot for people like the Mercers who aren't interested in the stage lights; and because his type of bullying has always been popular.1
It's the same thing we've seen with any number of other strong-man rulers around the world in the modern era. Some are legitimately intellectual (Mao, for example), whatever their moral failings, but most are just at the far end of the schoolyard-bully success curve.
1Particularly when it's built on social divisiveness, as Trump's is. The statistics show quite clearly that Trump's presidency is very much a racialized movement, and all the talk of it being about class is, frankly, bullshit.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
