For more than a year now, I’ve been
hearing from people in the inner circles of official Washington – GOP
lobbyists, Republican pundits, even a few Republican members of Congress – that
Donald Trump is remarkably stupid.
I figured they couldn’t be
right because really stupid people don’t become presidents of the United
States. Even George W. Bush was smart enough to hire smart people to run his
campaign and then his White House.
Several months back when Secretary
of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron,” I discounted it. I know
firsthand how frustrating it can be to serve in a president’s cabinet, and I’ve
heard members of other president’s cabinets describe their bosses in similar
terms.
Now comes “Fire and Fury,” a
book by journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed more than 200 people who
dealt with Trump as a candidate and president, including senior White House
staff members.
In it, National Security Advisor
H.R. McMaster calls Trump a “dope.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus both refer to him as an “idiot.” Rupert Murdoch
says Trump is a “f—king idiot.”
Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary
Cohn describes Trump as “dumb as sh-t,” explaining that “Trump won’t read
anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up
halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
When one of Trump’s campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, "before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Trump doesn’t think he’s stupid, of
course. As he recounted, “I went to an Ivy League college … I did
very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”
Yet Trump wasn’t exactly an academic
star. One of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School
of Business and Finance purportedly said that he was “the dumbest
goddamn student I ever had.”
Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton
on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer
who had known Trump’s older brother.
But hold on. It would be dangerous
to underestimate this man.
Even if Trump doesn’t read, can’t
follow a logical argument, and has the attention span of a fruit fly, it still
doesn’t follow that he’s stupid.
There’s another form of
intelligence, called “emotional intelligence.”
Emotional intelligence is a concept
developed by two psychologists, John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire,
and Yale’s Peter Salovey, and it was popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996
book of the same name.
Mayer and Salovey define emotional
intelligence as the ability to do two things – “understand and manage our own
emotions,” and “recognize and influence the emotions of others.”
Granted, Trump hasn’t displayed much
capacity for the first. He’s thin-skinned, narcissistic, and vindictive.
As dozens of Republican foreign policy experts put it, “he is unable
or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage
conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot
tolerate criticism."
Okay, but what about Mayer and
Salovey’s second aspect of emotional intelligence – influencing the
emotions of others?
This is where Trump shines. He knows
how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional
vulnerabilities – their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires – and
use them for his own purposes.
To put it another way, Trump is an
extraordinarily talented conman.
He’s always been a conman. He conned
hundreds of young people and their parents into paying to attend his near
worthless Trump University. He conned banks into lending him more money even
after he repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for them
and then stiffed them.
Granted, during he hasn’t always
been a great conman. Had he been, his cons would have
paid off.
By his own account, in 1976, when
Trump was starting his career, he was worth about $200 million, much of it from
his father. Today he says he’s worth some $8 billion. If he’d just put the
original $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be
worth $12 billion today.
But he’s been a great political conman.
He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them
to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton, and all the “wonderful,” “beautiful” things he’d do for the
people who’d support him.
And he’s still conning most of them.
Political conning is Trump’s genius.
It’s this genius – when combined with his utter stupidity in every other
dimension of his being – that poses the greatest danger to America and the
world.
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also
a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause,
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
