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. Its 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.
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