Book revision bleg

So I was reviewing the manuscript of my stupidity book, which is currently thirty chapters and 76K words. A lot of the book is about Trump and Trumpism, naturally, and there are many, many examples of his ignorance, intellectual laziness, and overall stupidity. (Fran Lebowitz’s famous dictum gets its own chapter).

But in reviewing it I was struck by how it currently doesn’t have a chapter dedicated to something that perhaps exists, or at least may exist in some very narrow and special sense, which is Trump’s genius, real or apparent. The only passage in the book that references this quality is in a discussion of the differences between Savvy Trump (knows he’s lying), Bullshit Trump (doesn’t care enough about the truth to lie in the technical sense), and Stupid Trump (high on own supply; work has become shoot etc.):

Savvy Trump knows these statements are lies, but he is so contemptuous of his supporters that he repeats them anyway, because he believes a lot of them will believe it, or at least want to believe it, and he is consciously lying because he sees it as in his interest to do so.   In this sense, Trump has always had a certain feral intelligence of a limited sort: the kind of intelligence possessed by ruthlessly amoral grifters, who are skilled at recognizing and cultivating potential marks.

Going over some of the recent stories on the fantastical extent and success of Trump’s cavalcade of grifts, it occurred to me that I should probably have a chapter on this, that grapples with the question of the whether and to what extent Trump does have a peculiar kind of intelligence/genius for identifying marks and ripping them off.

One version of this gift is captured by this excoriation from right wing ideologue Kevin Williamson:

He’s a simple man whose actions are most directly and accurately described as the ordinary daily application of his vices:  laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity.  He is a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools and a vulnerability to manipulation by men who are similarly vicious but more capable: Vladimir Putin, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, even one or two of his idiot children. 

“Savantic” is nice neologism for a kind real but incredibly narrow genius for one thing in particular, in a person who otherwise swims in a sea of boundless stupidity. In this version, Trump really is a genius of a very special kind: the comprehensive idiot who has an almost mystical cognitive gift in one very special respect: identifying people to rip off and then doing so. A chapter along these lines would be called something like “Cooling the MAGA Mark Out.”

At the other end of the spectrum 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 gift at all, even of the extraordinarily limited “savantic” type identified by Williamson, but is merely an empty receptacle into which people who for whatever reasons have a Will to Be Grifted pour their emotions and beliefs and most of all their money. This chapter would be called something like The Critique of Pure Stupidity.

The truth, perhaps, lies somewhere in the middle . . . but before writing this chapter I would very much appreciate the collective wisdom of this collectivity to opine on the issue.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.