The S-Word and Why We Need to Start Using It

 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 

On American Values

 

by EW Wilder

Despite our protestations otherwise, most Americans have few, if any, "sincerely held beliefs." We have a very weak system of values—really, no "system" at all—and a very fluid, if not utterly arbitrary, moral code. Instead of values, we cleave to a handful of rules or, more commonly, to slogans: "family values," "pro-life." Or we rally behind abstractions like "freedom" or "liberty" without much of a concrete sense of what those things mean in the real world.

Decades of messaging from right-wing media and thinks tanks have associated being against abortion as being "pro life," an idea that, thanks to the same outlets, fails to expand beyond birth, into adulthood, or across the nation's borders. It doesn't strike the average American as a contradiction that being against abortion but in favor of the death penalty is in any way problematic; it would never occur to an American as counter to being "pro life" to support killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza in the name of avenging 1200 Israelis, or, indeed, that it might conflict with a "pro life" stance for the US military to cause the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis for no apparent reason at all.

Americans pride themselves on being "values voters," and our media are happy to use the term, yet getting those same Americans to articulate those values clearly and in detail is next to impossible. We're happy to discuss "the ideological divide," but we're rarely confronted with the notion that an ideology is a coherent system with internal consistency, one applicable across a variety of social and political situations. Note how many of the same Americans who insist upon strict biblical literalism in issues of sexuality happily sport tattoos, wear their hair however they want, eat pork and shellfish and cheeseburgers as well, dress immodestly . . . . When those who dare to identify as leftists point out this hypocrisy, it does not compute; the leftist expects a system where only a rule exists, a principle where there's only a position.

American "values," then, don't exist outside of the individual and the individual's opinions, which, while a fittingly American attitude, makes it hard to thereafter claim divine providence for them. This fact merely makes the American proclaim them more loudly, often accompanied by the threat of extreme violence.

We believe in the divinity of our opinions not because we have much evidence for that, other than a few out-of-context bible passages, but because the opinions are ours, and we believe ourselves to be a Godly people. Because we believe we're Godly, our opinions are sanctified, not the other way around.

This is why people like Donald Trump can so successfully sway so many Americans: he embodies the idea that something is good and right when the individual thinks it or does it and bad and wrong when someone else does it or thinks it, even if it's exactly the same thing. So Joe Biden's justice system (even though, in point of fact, it is independent) prosecuting Donald Trump is bad, but Donald Trump promising to weaponize the justice system against Joe Biden is good.

This is the morality of children who haven't been taught right from wrong, as we used to say at a time when that phrase was associated with actual systems of values, which underscores my point: large numbers of Americans simply don't have a moral/ethical education of any worth.

To suggest a sense of the problem, I'll note how hard it can be to teach Toulmin-style argumentation in my second-semester composition classes. Stephen Toulmin's basic idea is that for every claim we make about the world, we have a warrant that we apply to the data we gather or receive, whether through formal research or sets of informal experiences. The problem is the warrant, the reason we think the claim fits the data.

I often use a very simple exercise in which I look at the price of a gallon of gasoline from, by turns, the perspective of a consumer (a position my students would be familiar with), an economist, and an environmentalist, asking whether or not the price is too high, too low, or just right. Thus one piece of data, the price of a gallon of gas, can lead to three different claims depending on the warrant we apply.

The problem I run into is that many of my students, generally the ones who claim to be conservatives, just don't get it. They either can't move beyond the perspective of a consumer, or, as likely, they simply don't see what the warrant has to do with anything, what weird magic would lead to different claims about a single point of data.

This brief essay is not to call for any sort of "traditional values," another vague term wielded by the authoritarian right. Traditional systems are patriarchal, racist, sexist, and unjust. Rather, it's to say that the American system of governance gives us an opportunity to be explicit and intentional about discussing and implementing systems of values, and we've squandered that opportunity for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power.

So not only do we need deep study of American doctrine—not only the actual text of the US Constitution but what it means and why it was written—but of other political and ethical values systems as well, within contexts in which it is OK to question and critique them in real and practical terms.

Yes, this is "critical thinking," and it may even involve "critical race theory" and other ideas with real weight. And that is exactly the point: if we are to be a nation of laws, or even if we aspire to be a lawful people, we need to understand values and principles, the systems in which they are embedded, and how they are applied in the real world.