While center-left commentators have finally started using the s-word to describe Donald Trump, senility, they're still avoiding the other s-word that has applied to Trump from the start: stupid.
A few Democratic and independent politicians have called Trump's policies, particularly tariffs, stupid, but they have studiously avoided applying that description to the president himself, probably out of fear of offending his base. After all, if he is stupid, aren't they stupid too for voting for him?
This fear is unfounded: core MAGA isn't going to vote for Gavin Newsom or JB Pritzker anyway. It's both safe and necessary to write those voters off. Trump has spent his career alienating everyone who disagrees with him, and he rode that open disdain to the White House, twice. The few voters who may cross the line are probably privately thinking the same thing anyway: "Yeah, now that I think about it, voting for that asshole was a pretty stupid thing to do."
For his part, Trump's record as a self-described dealmaker is poor: his half a dozen bankruptcies are good evidence of this, as well as his utter failure to bring North Korea to heel in his last term, to assuage Chinese aggression in either term, to even begin to stop the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which have ramped up on his watch. And this isn't beginning to touch on his use of tariffs as a blunt instrument of diplomacy, international trade, and even personal animosity. They've produced some revenue, but if they're ruled illegal, all that money will have to go back to the importers who paid them, and they certainly haven't been the boon for working-class Americans he promised them to be. Tariffs are the tool a person who doesn't understand the complexities of the current international scene would use—and by now, the rest of the world has figured out they're his only trick.
But you needn't take my word for it: a former professor from Wharton is purported for having thought Trump "the dumbest goddamn student I ever had" in the late 1960s, and that was when Trump was supposedly young and sharp. Rex Tillerson, when he was serving as Trump's Secretary of State, went a step further, having been noted as calling Trump "a fucking moron" during his first administration. If two people call you the same thing, decades apart, maybe they're on to something.
We don't need these blasts from the past to determine that Donald Trump is a stupid person, though. Witness his rambling speeches (which he may call "the weave" but which any competent person would call a mess); his assertion that toilets, showers, and dishwashers don't work anymore; his depiction of wind generators (which he calls "windmills") as making a winding/klaxon noise while they somehow kill whales and cause cancer. Then there are his description of Tesla's cars as "all computer," his consistent misuse of the term "cyber," and the fact that it literally took him over three years and thousands of war dead in Ukraine to realize that Vladimir Putin is a bad dude.
While we're at it, let's mention the spelling, usage, and capitalization of his online posts, the fact that his sense of "humor" is stuck at about a fifth grade level, his inability to understand that you can't lower a price "1500 percent," or the fact that his staffers can't get him to read his daily briefings and have to make videos for him or embed their messages on FoxNews.
No, Donald Trump is definitely stupid, and he always has been. Any mental decline we might be seeing now just makes the underlying problem worse. He may be losing his mind, but he didn't have all that much to lose to begin with.
Even his lies and evasions are those a stupid person would make to try to avoid embarrassment, as is his invective, which is almost all ad hominem and which he constantly spews in order to distract from the fact that he's stupid.
All of this is underscored by the fact that Trump insists that he is super smart, indeed, a "genius," just as a really stupid person who is way out of his depth and in a position far beyond his capacities would do.
Calling the president stupid is important for several reasons. First, it's known to get under his skin, and if his political opponents really want to do damage, they'll have to start throwing the word around. Since his own strategy (which, insanely, seems to work) is constant insults, those who wish to depose Trump need to use the one insult he hates most and to use it all of the time.
Second, calling Trump what he is reveals how truly sinister his enablers are. The Russell Voughts and the Stephen Millers and the Samuel Alitos and the Vlad Putins see Trump as a useful idiot, exploiting his inexplicable popularity and lack of savvy to push their own agendas. Using Trump this way is also the ultimate rightwing troll: if they can get someone as openly idiotic as Donald Trump elected (twice!), what can't they do? If low information voters, swing voters, and the MAGA faithful are willing to vote for, and in some cases worship, a "fucking moron," then the inability of the Democrats to gain any political traction at all is a good indication of that party's complete ineffectiveness.
Not that there's anything new in this on the right. Karl Rove as much as admitted that George W Bush's relative lack of intelligence is what made him appealing, and Ronald Reagan wasn't exactly the keenest president we ever had; he just gave off good vibes to Silent Generation voters who wanted redemption after having voted for Nixon and to Boomers who were already nostalgic for their childhoods in the '50s and '60s, already sensing they were past their prime.
This hubris, this remarkable evidence of rightwing power, is why Trump's enablers felt free to openly publish Project 2025. They knew that, no matter how alarming it was, Trump would likely get reelected anyway. They were right. Trump's success not despite but because of his immense stupidity is how the campaign knew they could insult Hispanic voters and threaten to deport them and still win more of them over. They were right about that, too. They knew no media figures or Democratic politicians would be bold enough to call a moron a moron and that American voters would respond by rewarding the moron because if there's one thing they can't stand it's weakness of any kind.
Just as with any other social or political movement that seems unstoppable, as with McCarthyism or fascism or Maoism, we need to call out its most obvious flaw: in this case, that its figurehead is an idiot.
The emperor Trump is, thank goodness, not nude. But his stupidity is right there, out in the open, for all sensible people to see.
All it takes is one person brave or innocent enough to point it out.
Image credit: Pascal Rey
