Trump is Smart

My newly politically engaged wife makes this point all the time, so I thought I’d share it with all of you: Trump is smart and, more importantly, he shouldn’t be underestimated.

By “smart”, I believe she means that he’s able to engage in means/ends reasoning that allows him to choose effective means to accomplish his ends. In other words, Trump has been getting what he wants. Yeah, his speeches are rambling nonsense. And, yep, some of what he wants is, by pretty much everyone’s reckoning, dumb. Still, I repeat, he gets what he wants. He’s cunning, if you don’t like the word “smart”.

Even if you don’t totally agree with my wife’s point, we all should be able to acknowledge that nobody’s gotten anywhere, politically, by calling Trump dumb. Yet the media consumed by politically active Democrats spends a great deal of time showing how dumb he is: MSNBC should probably be renamed the “Trump is dumb as shit” network. BlueSky is the “LOL look at what Trump said” social network.

Since we’re all smarty pants here — just ask us — let’s look to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to understand our plight. If virtue is the mean between excess and deficiency, then many politically-engaged Democrats are not virtuous when it comes to our view of intelligence and reason. We value it excessively. Most of us did pretty well in school, and we’ve internalized the notion that being rational is morally and intellectually right, and irrationality is immoral and can be mocked.

But, I’d argue, the virtuous path for reason and intelligence is to understand that all the smarts in the world don’t mean shit after someone’s smashed your head against a locker in the middle school hallway. (Aristotle outlined this argument in a later volume of this ethical writings, I’ll have to look up the reference.) Trump’s beating the shit out of us while we’re all pointing and laughing at the mush that comes out of his mouth.

The stupidity of what Trump says and does is mostly irrelevant to the politics of beating Trump and extinguishing Trumpism. Josh Marshall wrote a good piece yesterday about the muted (by fear) response to Trump, especially by colleges and universities who are losing grants. Our higher education system is a bunch of, essentially, temples built to worship rationality. They’re having a hard time dealing with the reality that even if their rational arguments prevail in court, Trump’s gonna fuck them.

Once they shake off the shock and awe of Trump fucking them over, higher ed might want to start trotting out sick kids who were cured at their hospitals and have their parents tell all of us what will happen to the next sick kid who has a disease that science might cure. They might want to throw away rational appeals and just aim for the gut, or the “lizard brain”.

The goal here isn’t to show that Trump says dumb stuff. The goal is to show that he’s mean, nasty and cruel and wants to kill kids. All the logic in the world showing that abortion is healthcare didn’t keep George Tiller from being gunned down at his church because he was, according to a bunch of not-very-smart people, a “baby killer”. They ultimately won. Trump is winning. Reason is a losing game. Time to try something else.