Please, Stop Calling Trump Stupid

The more you do, the more effective the spell is

I remember one day way back in the Bush Jr. years, I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, talking to a conservative family friend, a nice guy. He was an oil businessman in Texas. He told me that most oil wells still have tons of oil when deemed expired. And what pushes the oil deposits out in a gush is the gas trapped in the geologic deposits. Once the gas loses its pressure, the oil stops gushing. But you can still pump pressure into the deposit and push out more oil. That was his business. I have never heard that before, how interesting.

This guy was from Indiana and owned an oil business in Texas; he was as conservative as possible. But he also told me something I’d never heard before. He said Republicans and conservatives have this thing: They play dumb. It’s a communication strategy and a deceiving technique to manipulate and yield power. You think dumb, while I’m ahead of you.

This is also an old, tried, and true war strategy: to trick the enemy, making you underestimate their power, confuse a counterattack, delay and weaken the enemy’s response, and fake their actual position. Trump is not stupid; he knows exactly what he is doing.

Intelligence is a multidimensional thing. I knew a brilliant guy. He was a mathematician, engineer…