When was the last time you said this about a Republican president? He's really a bright guy.
Now I know your knee-jerk MAGA response will be, "you ain't that bright yourself," and I'll give you that. But you must give me the fact that I'm not—nor do I pretend to be—the president.
If you drift back in time through Trump I, W, HW, and Reagan, we don't find a lot of praise for their mental or intellectual acuity. This is not to claim they were bad people or that the Democrats were morally better. (Clinton did bring down that average a bit), but there is a cumulative effect in a party that dismisses intelligence as a leadership asset: it tends to elect malleable candidates, who are then molded by others who do not lack intelligence but whose radical or just plain whacked-out ideas would ordinarily nullify their candidacy.
I never thought I would say this, but can we have Gerald Ford back? He read books, knew history, and made decisions based on facts. Now we have an anti-intellectual who speaks in generalities about topics he barely understands and garnishes everything with a lie or two. And his people quietly agree.
The intelligence void he creates daily is being filled by people whom we would never elect as president. Would Musk or Vance win the nomination by ginning up talk about how the Nazis had some good points? Would Patel carry the majority of Americans by promising to break up the FBI and hamstring all other law enforcement organizations? And RFJ Jr.—who did seek the presidency—what would his majority be when he promised to stop funding for medical research because it didn't fit his concepts of medicine? Bondi? Hegseth? McMahon? Never. And yet the vacuum at the top has allowed these wannabes to become quasi-associate presidents.
One of my favorite Trumpisms is "like you wouldn't believe." He uses it often because to make an actual simile, he would need verifiable facts, which, since he doesn't read or study, would always be nebulous. If he were to use actual figures to discuss spending, I might listen, but when he claims some group is spending money "like you wouldn't believe," that's my cue not to believe him because he doesn't know anything. These days it's the guidance of Musk, who, as my new (and temporary) BFF Steve Bannon says, "wants to impose his freak experiments on the U.S." (The enemy of my enemy....) When Trumusk breaks up, someone else will fill in.
And this is why the Democratic party needs to be focused and aggressive. Trump's cabinet is low-hanging fruit, most with backgrounds that would invalidate them in normal times. If the Democrats let these people skate, they will pull Trump along with them. When JD Vance starts claiming it's okay to hoist a swastika on the town green, or Kash Patel turns law enforcement over to the Atomwaffen Division of Charlottesville fame, just remember the empty head at the oval desk is too ignorant to prevent it. And it's to their benefit to keep him that way.
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