LGM helps write a book

I wish I could have added more of your comments, but publishers hate long books now even more than they hate books in general, which is saying something. In any event, I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

                                                 Coda:  The Critique of Pure Stupidity

In looking over these pages, I’m struck by one fairly obvious and quite troubling question:  if Donald Trump is a comprehensive example of human stupidity in so many of its multifarious forms, how has he managed to be elected president of the United States twice, while exploiting that office to embezzle the multi-billion dollar fortune that, ironically, his most devoted followers believed he already possessed, and that was the most commonly cited reason for voting for this preposterous figure?

This book began with the observation that intelligence and stupidity both come in many forms, and that most people are intelligent in at least some ways, and unquestionably stupid in others, its author very much not excepted.

Could it be, then, that a necessary and even therapeutic focus on Donald Trump’s world-historical stupidity tends to blind us to his possible . . .  if not exactly “genius,” then at least his genuine cognitive talents, perversely and destructively limited as these undoubtedly are, assuming they exist at all?

I’ve speculated that Trump’s ever-shifting cognitive states can be sorted into three categories.  Savvy Trump is lying and knows it.  Bullshit Trump is too indifferent to the truth to manage to actually lie about it, since lying requires having beliefs about the truth or falsity of what one is saying.  Stupid Trump, meanwhile, is high on his own supply, and has allowed a “work” to become a “shoot” in terms of the kayfabe of the professional wrestling world.   I’ve also suggested that these are dynamic states of mind, and that Trump is deteriorating into a state where Stupid Trump has become much more dominant than Savvy Trump, although Bullshit Trump will very much always be with us for as long as he himself is.

This typology raises a closely related issue, which is this:  Trump’s genius, if he has one, would seem to be his ability to identify people who can be ripped off by his various schemes, the most spectacularly successful of which has been the Make America Great Again movement, which is essentially a culture-wide affinity fraud, designed to separate frightened old white people from their money.

Consider the astonishing cavalcade of Trump’s various grifts over the course of just the first year and a half of his second administration.    The following is merely a list of a few highlights, and omits many items:

*Trump founded a cryptocurrency firm at the same moment he was deregulating the entire crypto industry.  He then bought a separate firm that he used to buy his own cryptocurrency, while at the same time raising nearly one billion dollars from investors to buy that very same cryptocurrency.

*He launched a meme coin, aka, a lightly tarted up Ponzi scheme, that netted him hundreds of millions of dollars, even as the coin lost 97% of its “value.”

*He received the benefit of enormous crypto “investments” from foreign nationals, that were barely disguised bribes.  He pardoned one of these investors, wiping out a serious criminal conviction that was as straightforward a quid pro quo as one will ever see.

*His son-in-law Jared Kushner, a man with no experience in either high finance investment or international diplomacy, was given two billion dollars to manage by Saudi Arabia – this generated a $40 million investment fee for Kushner – and then was appointed by Trump to handle wartime negotiations with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitterest regional rival.  In the midst of the negotiation, Kushner solicited five billion more dollars for his fund from the Saudis and other Middle Eastern governments.

*Qatar gave Trump a $400 million luxury jumbo jet as a “gift.”  This is a completely unambiguous violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

*Perhaps the most amusing story in this cesspool of corruption was the Trump phone.  In June of 2025, Trump and his sons announced they were selling “Trump phone” – smart phones that would carry the president’s image on their screens, while being gilded in faux gold, and being made in the United States.  Nearly 600,000 people paid, collectively, almost $60 million in deposits for the purported right to purchase these phones.  One year later, not only had no phones been delivered, but the company that was supposedly producing them announced that it was under no obligation to do so, as customers had only purchased an option to purchase such a phone, should one be produced eventually.  (None of the $60 million in deposits was returned).

This again is nothing but a very limited selection of similar stories of unbounded venality and corruption.   Which, again, raises a pointed question:  Can a man who is this successful at stealing billions of dollars of public and private money be said to possess at least one extraordinary cognitive gift?

I posed this question on my blog, Lawyers, Guns & Money.  I framed the question in the following way.  First, I quoted right-wing polemicist Kevin Williamson, who claims that Trump is “a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools.”   Williams uses the neologism “savantic” to argue that Trump, who is otherwise a comprehensive moron, does possess the con man’s peculiar genius for plying his trade.  This, I suggested, could be characterized as a kind of extraordinary gift for “cooling the MAGA mark out.”  Cooling the mark out, as the great sociologist Erving Goffman explained, was the name given by those running a con game for the various strategies employed to keep marks from going to the authorities, once they began to suspect that they had been conned.

At the other end of the spectrum, I proposed, we have what could be called the Being There Projection. In the film Being There, Peter Sellers plays a, as Jeeves says of Bertie Wooster, “mentally negligible” man, who for reasons that have nothing to do with his extremely limited cognitive abilities, is treated as some sort of prophetic genius, who has insight into the most complex political and economic matters. In other words, the Being There Projection would conclude that Trump has no intellectual gifts at all, even of the extraordinarily limited “savantic” type identified by Williamson, but is merely an empty receptacle into which people who, for whatever complex set of reasons, have a Will to Be Grifted, pour their emotions and beliefs and most of all their money. This, I speculated, could be considered a kind of critique of pure stupidity.

My question produced hundreds of replies, many of them quite interesting and perceptive.  Here are a few:

I feel like we constantly underrate the extent to which Trump’s greatest “gift” really is just his cleverness in being born rich.

This simple explanation has, I believe, great explanatory power.  The notion that a very wealthy man must be “gifted” in some fundamental way is enormously powerful in a nation with such deep Calvinist roots.  (See in this regard Max Weber’s classic essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).  Reacting to the quoted comment above, another commenter remarks:

Trump in the 80s represented conspicuous wealth in pop culture. The average male dimwit saw a rich guy that was objectively silly looking yet bold and loud, answering to no one and partying the nights away with random beautiful women.

Reality TV Trump somehow made it even more fantastical by inventing the myth of his “business acumen”, capturing even more dimwits.

A sociologist remarked to me that, in Being There, Chance the Gardner is mistaken for a man of great importance simply because he’s wearing a well-tailored suit when a billionaire’s limousine runs into him.  He also noted that Chance, like Trump, does basically nothing but watch TV.

Another commenter focuses on Trump as a very recognizable social type:

I would like to once again reiterate one of my classic rants: Trump is a skilled salesman.

A very specific kind of salesman. Trump is a crooked used-car salesman working on 100% commission. He’s a realtor who will paint over that black mold slap some spackle over a crumbling foundation. He’s an insurance salesman for a company that didn’t exist last year and might not exist next year. He’s a Fuller Brush man but the Brushes are knockoffs.

It is the one thing he’s good at. He’s a genuinely dim man but dim men can have one skill and that is Trump’s one skill. He isn’t even unique in this regard; those stereotyped exist for a reason. The greasy, unctuous used-car salesman who sells you the floor mats and the undercoating is a central casting character because there are thousands of those guys making sales every day.

Aside from that? He’s lucky. He’s more lucky than almost anyone else in the world. Trump is a guy who goes all-in pre-flop on 7-2 offsuit and the runout is three through six. He just keeps getting lucky over and over and over, and he doesn’t even realize he’s lucky, he thinks it is all skill.

Another:

Trump does indeed have a savantic gift, and it is connected to his evil. He is a predator, and he is (uncannily in a human society in which The Hunt has been ritualized in any number of ways) good at identifying prey and (since he possesses no inhibitions or standards) spontaneous or offhand in going after it. To people who have been trained, as almost all of us have been, to jump through hoops to get what we want (to the extent that to many of us, the hoops end up being what we want) the results can look like magic.

Yet another comment achieves an almost Zen koan-like clarity.

His genius was being portrayed as a genius on a popular TV show.

This commenter makes a particularly canny sociological point:

Part of the problem is that people are very inconsistent about what they mean by “smart” or “stupid,” etc.

I don’t think Trump came into the world with a notable deficiency of cognitive horsepower, nor do I think he came into the world with a notable surplus. There is no evidence I’m aware of which would suggest he seriously engaged with any of the various traditional pursuits by which one might cultivate and apply their native store of cognitive horsepower in a pro-social, humanistic way. Instead he turned to conniving. It is likely impossible to disentangle the skill of his conniving from his wealth, because they reinforced each other’s potency. A man of lesser means could not have successfully stiffed all his contractors, secure in his ability to litigate them into oblivion if they tried to fight him. A man of greater character wouldn’t have bothered. So he kept climbing one ladder and descending the other until he became this thing.

This thing that Trump is today, is severely degraded from the peak of his mental acuity. I think he’s pretty far gone in capability. I don’t think he was ever a moron. The crude manipulation and cruelty remain.

This suggests that Trump was once, despite Fran Lebowitz’s dictum, a man of no worse than average general intelligence, to the problematic extent there is even such a thing, but that a lifetime of astounding mental laziness and complete intellectual incuriosity has left his mind in an extremely atrophied state (The extent to which early stage dementia may be playing a role in that atrophy is something we will probably have to wait for the post-presidency tell-all books to reveal).

Perhaps Trump’s real genius, to the extent it exists, is to be a genius of self-promotion in a culture that has become obsessed with it:

I’ve always thought Trump is an idiot savant at self-promotion. His shamelessness allows it where mere motals would tread with more modesty.

One commenter considers the question, and finds it triggering something akin to a metaphysical crisis:

Trump’s supposed genius poses a challenge to my own ontological conception of the self in that I cannot locate such a phenomenon in what I know of the man. Yet because it is insisted that he has it something must exist even if it’s not intrinsic to his person.

Donald Trump is not a skilled liar. Any parent with small children recognizes his style of inventive dissembling as standard “the monster under the bed ate my homework” stuff. Nor is he interesting for long stretches even he has to take dance breaks during his stemwinders. I think Elizabeth Holmes is one of the key symbols of our age. Success because the marks are desperate to believe.

Finally, a commenter notes that the very existence of someone like Trump at the top of society could potentially trigger something along the lines of a legitimation crisis:

I just finished a book on the fall of the French Third Republic, and I started a more general history of the interwar years in Europe. Reading about this period of history makes Trump seem less unique, though still an extreme example. The basic super power of this type is a combination of elites protecting their own, regular people wanting to maintain a rules-based order, and the power that comes from being part of the elite, but not caring at all about maintaining the illusion that elites are in some way better ( largely because they are too stupid to realize there is an illusion to be maintained, and really think they are better at everything).

People like Trump realize that if they just start breaking rules, others will adapt to make the rules conform to their actions, rather than punish them for breaking those rules. They have an instinct for recognizing what is just a social convention, like not saying a bunch of racist and misogynist things, or not engaging in super scammy business practices that are beneath even most cutthroat corporations, and what is pushing things too far, like actual visible physical violence or using the N word. He seems very similar to a lot of the fascists: they recognize if they just start taking action others will not incur the costs of stopping them, but instead will seek to change social conventions to allow for their behavior.

So don’t think Trumps genius is about finding marks. Rather it is learning that as a rich and powerful person, outside of a very narrow range of actions, you are largely protected from consequences, and other elites will seek to shield you from consequences to maintain the fiction that elites are deserving of their status. If someone like Trump were treated like a regular person, this would threaten elite status generally.  Trump learned he could do what he wanted, and others would simply clean up after him, because this was easier, and it maintained a lot of fictions that were very valuable to other people. And he continues to have a good instinct for how far can he push things, so that other powerful people judge that it is better to treat his outrageous behavior as normal than it is to allow his behavior to make elite belief and behavior more generally questionable. He abuses the protection his status grants him at every opportunity, but others of similar status regard the threat to their status from punishing him greater than the threat to that status from letting him get away with his behavior.

Many other comments touched on a similar theme.  Trump’s “genius” for profiting from his bottomless corruption has more in common with Ted Bundy’s “genius” for murdering young women than it does with the cognitive virtues we normally associate with that word. 

Trump is a person born into extraordinary wealth and all the privileges that go with such wealth in our society, who also happens to be a narcissistic sociopath of an extreme type. He thus feels even less bound by social rules – such as don’t steal from people just because you can get away with it – than even most other extremely rich people in this increasingly degenerate plutocracy.

His genius, such as it is, was to grasp fairly early on in life that consequences were for other people.  That he managed to transform that insight into an entire political movement says more about the depravity of his followers than it does about his supposedly savantic gifts.