The genius of Trump
President Trump has a, like, really smart point about intelligence: It’s a highly subjective quality that can be debated endlessly without ever getting anywhere — which is just the sort of debate on which Trump thrives.
While the president is noticeably short on aspects of intelligence that might serve, say, a president — focus, curiosity, equanimity — he also possesses an instinctive genius for drawing attention to himself and confounding his critics. The question of Trump’s mental acuity is a case in point.
Trump was the least prepared and most unorthodox presidential candidate in memory, and Republicans and Democrats alike publicly doubted his fitness for the office well before he assumed it. The criticism has only been encouraged by his tenure, from his shambolic work habits to his all-too-easy banter about the nuclear arsenal, which evokes the most existential fears about presidential capacity.
Trump’s brandishing of the nuclear “button” at Kim Jong Un and Michael Wolff ’s inside-the-administration tell-all, “Fire and Fury” — named after another threat Trump leveled at North Korea — have revived the issue. Amid reported doubts about the president among his lieutenants, mental-health professionals and Democratic lawmakers have even raised the extremely remote possibility of removing him from office as mentally unfit under the 25th Amendment.
For Trump’s part, the awkwardness of defending one’s own mental faculties has never prevented him from doing so. He has repeatedly cited his Ivy League education (at the University of Pennsylvania) and (unspecified) IQ score, and he has claimed to have not only the “best words” but also a “very good brain.” He enthusiastically continued in that vein on Twitter last week, defending himself as “like, really smart” and, come to think of it, “not smart, but genius ... and a very stable genius at that!”
In one sense, Trump’s remarks disprove themselves, suggesting deep insecurity about what’s underneath his hairdo. Research has shown that ignorant people are more likely to overestimate their competence, which may be why not many geniuses have been known to clumsily assert their own genius. Moreover, Trump’s defensive response to Wolff ’s book only seems to have boosted its sales, and that doesn’t seem very smart.
Or does it? Attempts to get inside Trump’s head do behoove him in another sense, allowing him to engage in a distracting debate with the elites he accuses of looking down on him and his supporters. As long as we’re arguing about whether Trump is crazy or stupid, we aren’t discussing how he has betrayed the people he claims to serve.