Bleg to the LGM universe

As I might have mentioned at some point I’m writing a book on the Trump era entitled The Triumph of Stupidity. It occurred to me that it might be useful or at least amusing to append a document, tentatively entitled I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe, that would be nothing but a compendium of especially stupid things Trump has done and said over the course of his presidencies, especially the second one. This is of course a vast subject, though I do try to at least mention if not discuss at length the items in the very rough draft of the appendix as it now stands. And this, friends, Romans countrymen, is where you all come in, I hope.

Below is the emphasize again ROUGH draft of the appendix. I know I’m missing many fascinating and excellent items — indeed just today Rob’s post and the comments to it reminded me of the steam catapult, the forest raking, the bleach for Covid . . . it’s hard to remember everything is what I’m saying so help an LGM brother out, and I’ll mention you or your nym in the acknowledgments when this is finally published, in the year 2525 (if man is still alive). TIA xoxo:

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I’ve made 200 deals (on tariffs three months into his term).

Price of eggs down 93% or 94%.

Prescription drug prices down 600%

Biden made a big mistake appointing Jerome Powell as head of the Fed.  (Appointed by Trump in 2017).

Fired head of BLS because he didn’t like the stats BLS published.

Claimed government had taken in eight trillion in tariff revenue as of 9/2025.  Actual government stats were 1.78% of that figure.

Claimed two months into the Iran war that gas prices had been six dollars per gallon two years earlier.  Government stats showed gas averaging $3.66 in May 2024.

Ordered water released from reservoirs in California’s central valley, to put out wildfires in Los Angeles, that were hundreds of miles away on the other side of a mountain range, and largely out already.

Claimed on multiple occasions during the 2024 campaign that elementary schools were performing secret gender reassignment surgeries on students during the school day.

Claimed that a mass blackout during the 2024 presidential debate (this did not happen) was caused by the wind not blowing, which stopped wind-powered electrical power plants from being able to operate.

Illegally ordered boats to be blown up in the Caribbean, to stop drug smuggling.  DEA statistics months later showed no decline in such smuggling, despite hundreds of people having been killed in these operations, many of them ordinary fishermen.

Said that Democratic lawmakers protesting this operation should be executed for treason.

The Portland fire apocalypse:  In an October 2025 interview with NBC News, Trump revealed he had spoken to Oregon’s governor, who assured him that the tiny protests in Portland, featuring a few dozen people at a time, were perfectly peaceful.  “I said, Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.  They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place . . . it looks terrible.”

It then emerged that Trump had watched a deceptively edited story on Fox, that was sufficiently confusing to convince an increasingly confused old man that protests from five years earlier were happening that very night.  The most amazing feature of this amazing situation was that Trump had expressed the very same confusion a few weeks earlier, during a news conference, when he revealed that he had watched footage from Portland “last night,” that again was from the summer of 2020.  He cited this Fox News report as evidence of what he called “the destruction of the city.”

Trump’s delusions and/or lies regarding this subject only continued to become more baroque. By mid-October he was claiming that “every time I look at that place it’s burning down,” and that “there are fires all over the place.”  In a surreal press conference, he claimed that “when a store – there are very few of them left – but when a store owner rebuilds a store they build it out of plywood.  They don’t put up storefronts anymore.  They just put wood up.” 

December 2025:  Demanded that Washington D.C.’s NFL team name its soon to be constructed $3.5 billion stadium after him, or risk losing the federal subsidies helping to finance the project.

Ordered the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to be re-named The John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump center.

Claimed repeatedly that he had “aced” no fewer than three dementia tests in the first year of his second term, as he continued to confuse dementia screening tests with general intelligence tests.  Boasted about being able to distinguish a picture of a giraffe from that of a cow.

Hosted Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, and humbly accepted her purported transfer of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to him, as she handed him a medal symbolizing the prize.

Gratefully accepted the first FIFA Peace Prize, from the notoriously corrupt international soccer organization that runs the World Cup.

Threatened to annex Greenland by force, most probably because the Mercator projection makes it look nearly as big as the continent of Africa, and because he is unaware 95% of the island is an uninhabitable icecap.

Wrote letter to the prime minister of Norway, complaining that his country didn’t give him the Nobel Peace Prize (the Norwegian government has nothing to do with the awarding of the Nobel prizes).

Complained in the same letter than Denmark’s claim to Greenland was weak (Denmark and Norway are different countries).

Ordered the seizure of voting rolls from the 2020 presidential election, on the basis of fantastical conspiracy theories about how it was supposedly stolen from him.

Launched the Iraq war on the assumption that a short bombing campaign would cause the Iranian government to collapse.  When this didn’t happen, spent months going back and forth between claims that he had won the war, that he had negotiated a peace deal, that he was bombing Iran into submission, that he was about to reach another peace deal, and so forth and so on.

Sent his completely unqualified nepo baby failson-in-law Jared Kushner to negotiate a complex nuclear disarmament agreement – a subject about which Kushner knew nothing.

Was surprised when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz (something every regional expert knew was certain to happen in the event of an attack on Iran).

The Reflecting Pool fiasco.  Trump had stupid idea, handled it with the maximum incompetence, then concocted an insane conspiracy theory to explain why the pool started falling apart immediately after the renovation.

As public ridicule piled up, Trump’s obsession with the project and its spectacular failure grew ever-more intense, and he concluded that the whole thing had been carried out perfectly in every respect, but that the project had been sabotaged subsequently by deranged haters of Trump and America.   Specifically, he claimed that a person or persons unknown had used a box cutter or knife to cut a “gash” or “slit” in the polyurea coating lining the concrete basin.   On one morning in late June, he claimed this hideous scar was 250 feet long.  A couple of hours later, at a press conference that was supposed to be about something else entirely, he returned to his obsession, saying that the supposed slit was “290 or 300 feet” in length.  Later that afternoon this became 350 feet.   He also claimed someone had dumped enormous quantities of fertilizer and other toxic substances into the pool’s water. 

A bunch of people are arrested on obviously spurious charges to appease him.

Tariffs: An incredibly bizarre and destructive policy, supported by no one, and hurting almost literally everyone.  The triumph of the authentic Trumpian stupidity is reflected in the extent to which it has made one particular belief absolutely central to all political discourse in the Republican party, and on the American right wing generally.

That particular belief is the key concept at the core of the stupid person’s world view, and it is this: All of these apparently complicated problems that trouble our society, and that interfere with our impending return to greatness, are actually very simple.  For every social problem there is always a simple solution – one weird trick – that solves the problem perfectly.  All you need is common sense, and an unwillingness to be fooled by the so-called experts.  This is the stupid person’s Nicene Creed.

Trump thinks that economic strategies that were largely discredited 130 years ago are actually very simple solutions to the problems of international trade, because everything has a simple solution if we would just use common sense.  Trump thinks a trade deficit means that the country with the deficit is subsidizing the country with the surplus.  He thinks this because he’s too lazy and ignorant to acquire any real knowledge about any even moderately complicated subject.  When he says the US is subsidizing Canada at a rate of $500 billion per year, he’s quoting the amount of stuff the US buys from Canada.  That’s a subsidy in his mind, because he is incapable of understanding even the most basic economic facts.

Trump went even further in an interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press in May, 2025.  When Welker tried to press him on the economic costs of his tariff policies, he explained that in fact those policies were saving the nation hundreds of billions of dollars just in trade with China alone: “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China.  Now we’re essentially not doing business with China.  Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars.  It’s very simple.”

Tariffs were going to generate enough income to replace the federal income tax.

In terms of economic analysis, the statement “to me, a deficit is a loss,” might as well be two plus two equals five, or maybe eight.

Tweet Trump posted on Easter morning, five weeks into the Iran war.  “Tuesday will be Power Plant day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump wrote.  (This referred to his threat a few days earlier to commit war crimes, by bombing civilian infrastructure for the sake of raining death and destruction down on Iran’s population, as opposed to its military). “Open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!”  This missive then inexplicably ended with the phrase “Praise be to Allah.  President Donald J. Trump.” 

In August of 2026, Donald Trump revealed that he thought childhood vaccines put as much liquid into a child at one time as a bottle of soda.   “I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” he said, while signing an executive order purporting to require the MMR vaccine to be administered on three separate occasions, rather than simultaneously.  Any immunologist or pediatrician could tell you this is insane as both a matter of science and public policy). 

Trump is constantly saying “no one’s ever thought of that,” when “that” turns out to be something like what caused the Civil War, and whether it would have possible to avoid it, as if this wasn’t one of the most intensely debated topics in the history of American history.

In the summer of 2026 inflation was higher than it was in the last year of Biden’s presidency.  This led to Trump to claim several times that “affordability” was a fake word that had just been invented by Democrats.  That in turn was just one of Trump’s increasingly wild linguistic misunderstandings, which included constantly confusing political asylum with asylums for the mentally ill, and asserting that the CHIPS Act, which subsidized the production of transistors for semiconductors, required the hiring of trans people.

Claimed repeatedly that his father was born in Germany (he was born in New York City).

The 2020 election and the big lie (and/or delusion):

The entire narrative around Trump and his supporters’ wholly fabricated claim that he would have won the 2020 election if only legal votes had been counted, and that therefore the presidency was stolen from him.

The remarkable thing about this claim is not just that there’s literally no evidence for it, but that the people who even now, after his legitimate re-election, continue to make it, including most crucially Trump himself, have never bothered to pretend that there was any evidence for it.   They just claim it’s true, over and over again. This is the aggressively performative stupidity of conspiracism in a nutshell.

This in turn is just a replay of the entire Birther conspiracy – the always completely evidence-free claim that Barack Obama wasn’t a native born American – that launched Trump’s entire career.

LGM commenter: “He is constantly looking at complex subjects and deciding after 30 seconds that he knows more about them than anyone.”  (Dunning-Krueger).

Rake the Canadian forests to stop forest fires.

Nuke hurricanes.

Inject bleach.

Add an engine to the F-16

Take aspirin for thinner blood.

Don’t exercise because the heart has only so many beats in it.

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