Anyone who is intelligent and not born yesterday should be able to see that Trump is a well-crafted character, more so than a real person.
The person we see on TV and in Twitter rants is about as real as Slim Shady, the character who Eminem created. Eminem may have taken some influence from his own personality and life circumstances in creating Slim, but obviously Eminem is not Slim. If Slim Shady were real, he would be in prison right now—the place that most low-functioning sociopaths go—not living the life of a very successful and wealthy recording artist.
Of course, the very key to Eminem’s success was that he created a cartoon version of himself. No one actually wants to know the true life story of Marshall Mathers, as is actually happened. Some people, however, tend to be drawn to figures who rebel against society and break norms to make a statement.
Donald Trump is over-the-top in this very sense. His fan base consists of people who root for him to break societal norms, kill the sacred cows, and disregard political taboos. The very existence of this Trump character, and the fact that so many people are drawn to him, says a lot more about society than it does about the person portraying the character.
I would briefly address this by saying that people who feel powerless in society may get a cathartic release by watching someone who has the power to break all the rules that they feel are part of a system holding them down.
We essentially have Yosemite Sam as President.
It’s important to note that Trump’s critics are also drawn to him in much the same way as his fans, particularly his critics in the media. He knows how to stir the pot in just the right way to create fireworks. And this creates a cyclical reaction. The more the media criticizes him, the more this emboldens his fans.
No boring conventional President would ever get this much media coverage.
Back to the question at hand. What of the real Trump? How intelligent is he? It’s important to first note that while Trump is being somewhat fake, I don’t think he is any more fake that your average politician.
But your average politician is fake in a different way. Your average politician is driven by polls and public sentiment. Every week, they follow a script that tries to track the public’s mood for that week. The result is very disjointed, like a TV show that hires new writers every week, but there’s just enough continuity to pull it off. Someone who has enough memory to remember previous episodes and even previous seasons will see how contrived the scripts are. Like when Obama suddenly had a personal awakening and came out in favor of gay marriage, after saying he was against it for so long. This is exactly what we expect from politicians. Nothing they say they believe in has meaning. It’s all part of today’s script.
Anyone who is intelligent can see that most politicians are unbelievable, even as fictional characters, much less real people.
Trump, on the other hand, is a very different type of TV show. His story has no script and is completely character-driven. Every action he takes, everything he says publicly, is driven more by the impulse of what would the character he has created do in a particular situation. His form of entertainment shares a lot in common with improv and stand-up comics.
Trump will maintain the caricature he has created, even when that caricature gives ammunition to his critics, simply because the worst thing he could do at this point is to disappoint his fans who expect Trump to be “Trump”.
Looking a little deeper, there is evidence to believe that at least one part of Trump’s caricature is real. He is not someone who gives a lot of credibility to conventional wisdom. This after all is how he developed a strategy to win the election in the first place.
Conventional wisdom said that certain Democratic stronghold states in the Midwest would continue to be easy wins for Democrats. Hillary Clinton was certainly a true believer in this conventional wisdom. She drank the kool-aid, and that’s why it was obvious that she was genuinely shocked at the outcome. The most real thing we’ve ever seen Hillary Clinton do was crying on election night.
Had Clinton not been blinded by conventional wisdom, she would have seen that these blue union states were full of unhappy socially conservative white people who were not exactly big fans of the Rainbow Coalition that had become the centerpiece of the Democrat Party. In fact, it’s really surprise that these states remained safe Democrat territory for as long as they did. Many of these people probably would have joined the Republican Party a long time ago, except the Republican Party was also too tied to conventional wisdom to properly court them. But especially after years of the Democrats shifting their focus away from the values of blue-collar white folk, and onto minorities and the advent of Hollywood liberalism, it should have been painfully obvious that these voters were ripe for this picking.
The inability of almost everyone in the media and political circles to see this can only be described as mass stupidity, but that’s often what conventional wisdom is.
A very intelligent person should be able to form their own opinions of the world, without just listening to conventional wisdom. That doesn’t mean conventional wisdom is always wrong. Sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes it’s right.
It also doesn’t mean that someone who defies conventional wisdom is automatically a genius. This is more of a personality trait than a measurement of IQ. And we don’t actually even know who was most responsible for Trump’s election strategy. It may have been some keen adviser with-in the Trump camp who noticed that they could flip the election by targeting a specific group of disenfranchised white people. But of course, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the Trump campaign was the only campaign to see this. Trump attracted people to his campaign who look past conventional wisdom. And well, as they say:
Birds of a feather flock together.
So yes, I give Trump and his posse a lot of credit for addressing issues that no politician who is beholden to conventional wisdom would speak about.
Yes, we have been letting China screw us over for some time now.
Yes, birth-right citizenship does create problems that need to be looked at.
Despite the over-the-top antics, there are intelligent things that Trump is saying and doing. And rather than credit this to him being a “stable genius”, I think it has more to do with him being willing to look past conventional wisdom. Of course, there’s a difference between looking past conventional wisdom and just defying it for the sake of rebellion. Someone who just defies conventional wisdom for the hell of it is an idiot, where as someone who looks past conventional wisdom and chooses when to ignore it might be intelligent.
But the actual intelligence of the man behind the cartoon character is very hard to assess.
I would say that his intelligence is probably above average, since it’s inconceivable that his success in life was entirely due to luck or other people helping him out. People aren’t so nice, and if he was actually an idiot surrounded by shrewd scumbags, those same shrewd scumbags who made him successful would have taken the success for themselves.
Yes, his father gave him a very strong foundation to build success from, which a lot of very intelligent people never even get. But there are also plenty of examples of people born into wealth who are dumb as a doorknob, and the results show. Someone like Paris Hilton is an example of a rich person who has very average or slightly-below average intelligence. Trump would appear to be way smarter than Paris Hilton, although he probably falls quite short of being a true genius.
If I had to guess, I’d put Trump’s IQ somewhere in the low 120 range. This assumes that most of the mad man image is fake, which I think is reasonable to assume if we assume that the laws of nature are rational enough to not promote a mad man to the top of the food chain simply for being mad. Then again, that in itself may be another piece of conventional wisdom that is wrong. So at the end of the day, who knows? Trump could be that outlier that defies rational explanation.
He might even be the idiot his critics think he is, but I would say that’s improbable at the least. The most rational explanation of Trump is that he’s a media-savvy individual who is guided by a contrarian outlook of the world, and is smart enough to appear dumber than he really is.