Bluesky

Intelligence is sometimes a handicap in politics.

Idk if I'd call it a handicap. I'd say it is tangential to the goal of building a large base of supporters, particularly when the "intelligent" move you see before you is to fatten your own wallet or adhere to some big money economic orthodoxy in order to climb the corporate ladder.

Like, the classic examples of this were Hillary v Obama in 2008 and Hillary v Donald in 2016. Hillary Clinton was clearly smarter - and in many ways more politically savvy - than Trump. She was arguably more experienced and politically educated than Obama. And they were both miles ahead of the rest of the GOP field. Hillary had run circles around her Republican rivals for decades, cultivated networks of plutocrats that would have otherwise been Republican stalwarts, built large organizations throughout the Atlantic Coast and the Southwest to power her ambitions during the Bush Era, and added substantially to her family fortune from historical right-wing sources while at the head of the liberal leadership team in an era when Democrats as a party were on the decline.

But she got the rug pulled on her in the '08 primary, simply because she refused to admit she was wrong on her Iraq War vote six years earlier. And she got beaten again, by a whisper thin margin, because her business friendly calculus in backing NAFTA for thirty years finally caught up with her.

As far as Trump goes, I would say his intelligence was never a hindrance he had to manage in any way because he is, was, and always will be abundantly stupid.

I would argue that Trump was significantly smarter than the median GOP primary candidate in '16 and '24. A lot of folks love to pillar him as stupid, but he clearly has an ability to read a room and reflect those feelings back to a crowd in a way DeSantis and Huckabee and Jeb! did not. He wasn't afraid to say the Iraq War was a mistake. He regularly bragged about his role in government corruption when it was clear voters assumed everyone was corrupt and considered this a point of transparency. He was more openly racist, when the base demanded more racism, and (often quixotically) more openly LGBTQ+ friendly when the base stopped giving a fuck about villainizing gay relationships. Call it Emotional Intelligence, if nothing else. The man might not even be literate, but he's clearly clever as a fox and twice as predatory.

But I also think he's a product of the historical moment. His popularity is largely a consequence of decades of political orthodoxy on Rich People Being Better Than You, hammered into the heads of his base voters. He was given a big megaphone to say "I'm a rich white guy with a hot wife, vote for me" in an era when being a rich white guy with a hot wife was a great way to build a popular base of voters.

He lucked into office in 2016 in the same way Obama lucked into office in 2008. In a prior moment, it wouldn't have worked. In this moment, he was the man that fit what Americans were being sold as Presidential.