I imagine most of us have been in technical meetings where people who have no idea about the real problem are speaking as if they are the expert. Its incredibly unproductive, and only slows down making real progress and and getting to a real resolution.
Even if he was right, which he is not, he should let his experts speak about these matters and get out of the way.
He has also been culling any form of dissent from his government, so it’s now essentially an echo chamber.
But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side. I don't think there's any other way to square that.
That's basically what he did during the election. He honed in on the single worst characteristic about the other candidates, "Low Energy Jeb", "Lyin' Ted", "Crooked Hillary", etc. And it worked.
The problem is that he's a salesman, he's not an intellectual. So a lot of the stuff he says is off the cuff and colloquial which is dangerous and unpresidential. He succeeded in business by bullying his opponents and using his power against them by squeezing them. But it's not something that works in politics, because his opponents are generally much smarter than he is.
> But it's not something that works in politics
The first rule of politics is to win elections. He's currently the most powerful politician in the world. Of course it works in politics.
Governing on the other hand...
That was my impression before the election, when I didn't pay any attention. I thought he was a successful bully, which wouldn't necessarily be the worst combination for a President.
After learning about his actual business history (Thanks, Trump Inc.! podcast) I think the 'succeeded' part is pretty arguable. He was born unbelievably wealthy, had a string of some unbelievable business failures, and was subsequently bailed out by some known (Deutsche Bank) as well as unknown shady actors and practices.
Now that I understand his business history, I wouldn't consider him to have succeeded in business. He could have been vastly more wealthy today by doing nothing other than invest in index funds, which to me counts as largely unsuccessful.
... Well you start out with 100 million!
Isn't that unknowable without knowing how much he has spent along the way?
- Case A: Donald Trump runs his companies starting at year X and meanwhile leads a lavish lifestyle, ending up with N1 dollars.
- Case B: Donald Trump puts all his money in index funds and spends nothing, ending up with N2 dollars.
As far as I can tell, you are saying N2 > N1, therefore he would have been better off investing in index funds. But you are comparing apples to oranges if you have different spending habits between the cases. It could be that running his private plane or plating things in gold or whatever would have drained his index fund investment totally.
I think Trump has been successful. Many people born into wealth lose it or at least don't grow it. So he deserves some kudos here.
I think people don't like to give him credit for anything, but if you "only" grow your fortune at the rate of the market, then you're really tracking the average success of American business. That's by definition better than 50% of public companies and in the top few percent of individuals. That's successful in my books.
This post is attracting quite a bit of negative attention, but I stand by my assessment as fair. If you disagree, maybe you want to point out how it's not fair? I think people just hate Trump (which I do as well, but I can separate concerns.)
People who can't stand Trump have taken the bait. Deplorable is not a popular word anymore but the reaction to the President's inconsequential meandering does, happily for some, imply that Trump fans are gullible, poor and idiotic.
note that empathy here refers to the facet that let's you tease out how people are feeling and what's causing those feelings (to your point), not the one that makes you genuinely care for other people.
with that said, it's unlikely that the election tipping point was honing in on the biggest weakness of an opponent. that's incidental to his real strength in this area, which is honing in on the central fear of--let's not beat around the bush--large blocks of white people.
this is how you make sense of seemingly disparate issues like immigration, nationalism, tax breaks for the wealthy, and anti-abortionism that the trump campaign championed (even if he doesn't personally care about immigration or abortion policy, for example).
trump won by using his sales-honed empathy to zero in on this central fear and then beat that drum relentlessly to victory. clinton, on the other hand, empathized in the other sense of the word (to some extent), but failed at understanding the basic motivations of the populace.
This depends on what you mean by "works in politics"? He won the presidency after all, and then went on to beat a resistant republican party into submission. He lowered taxes on the rich, packed the supreme court, and is in the process of handing out 6 trillion dollars to wall street. His approval ratings have been constant through impeachment and pandemic [1] and he still has a good shot at reelection.
Assuming you aren't a supporter, I think there is a significant risk in underestimating his political successes. We shall see if Biden and the DNC can "outsmart" him in 2020.
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
All they had to do, arguably, is advance a viable candidate with no glaring weaknesses, and they utterly failed. It's going to be another 4 years of Trump.
Some people love these things about him. And some people don't care. That's why he's president. Not because he has no glaring weaknesses. A turnip has no glaring weaknesses compared to Trump.
He is a D-minus tabloid trash celebrity clown act. Always has been. Always will be. For three years as president, as candidate, before he was in politics, and while he flipped multiple times between being a registered Democrat and Republican, when he wasn't in politics at all. He was always a clown act. He is the most exquisite representative for both his supporters and the people who are non-participants, and in some hilariously perverse sense he's evidence that democracy does work still in America. He properly implicates American culture. Even the fact he lost the popular vote yet still is president, is representative of American culture where you can be a dipshit loser and a bad person, but still make lots of money and be famous, and that's what makes you a winner.
This thread is exactly why Trump is so dangerous to the democratic party. Look at the level of vehenemence and aggression in your post directed at a potential ally.
Is there actually a codified set of instructions on what is "presidential" and what is not? Otherwise we descend into the domain of things being verboten and the retort of "well it's common sense" and so forth.
E.g. when Trump says there were "very fine people, on both sides" of a white supremacist rally, what should we make of that? Should we quibble over implausible re-interpretations of his words and conclude that maybe he meant something other than what's obvious? Should we say hey, okay, maybe Nazism and white supremacist movements deserve another look because, like, everything's relative, man, you know?
When Trump uses racist and sexist dogwhistles (e.g. "a young woman governor") to denigrate to his political opponents, what's the takeaway there? Is that okay? Is that a man worthy of respect, of sitting in the Oval Office?
When Trump suggests that we should inject ourselves with "disinfectant" to cure COVID, am I supposed to conclude that he is so smart I just can't possibly understand the genius behind his words (it's so simple!) or should I throw that on the pile of evidence that he's an ignorant person with no capability and/or inclination for understanding complex issues?
If I thought everything was relative, I'd have to think nothing mattered more than anything else, and the logical next step would be to lay down in my bed and wait for the sweet release of death. We live in a world that is not black and white, but we have to do the best we can to be better people and hold our leaders to high standards. Intellectual honesty is the first step, and it's what the GOP and their more intellectually accomplished adherents lack.
Not that it actually mattered, given the way the US electoral process works, but the premise that Clinton was overwhelmingly unpopular is an exaggeration. She just wasn't popular enough in the right states.
It's true that a lot of Democrats wanted Bernie Sanders, but I suspect more of them flipped to Hillary Clinton than to Donald Trump.
If "people didn't want Clinton", they wanted Trump even less.
> But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side.
The second thing is part of the reason he achieved the first thing. His smarts is knowing what sells to his base, and what consolidates them.
Part of that is saying "dumb" or offensive stuff, with a lining of rhetoric that echoes with their anxieties.
>> But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side.
> The second thing is part of the reason he achieved the first thing. His smarts is knowing what sells to his base, and what consolidates them.
> Part of that is saying "dumb" or offensive stuff, with a lining of rhetoric that echoes with their anxieties.
I agree and disagree. I think you're right that his "dumbness" helped, but I don't think it was just about saying offensive stuff. It also meant that he was very willing to push polices that were against the status quo consensus (e.g. tariffs [1]), without hemming and hawing. That can appeal strongly to people who feel that the status quo hurts them.
It's usually smart to play it safe, which means not straying too far from the status quo and only risk the minimum you think is required for victory. To stray, you either have to be really smart (come up with a brilliant bet no one else sees), or really dumb (not realizing there are safer bets to achieve your goal). Trump was the latter.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/07/dona...
I guess I'm not convinced that it's easy to differentiate the two.
I'm no supporter of the current POTUS, but I think his reality-TV derived smarts are indeed a kind of "smarts", in the same way that con-artists, or even popular show-runners are very smart. For one thing, they know their audience.
Of course it's a disaster in our current situation, but I don't think he won the office through pure idiocy.
I guess I don't buy that it's dumb, in the same way that I don't think Infowars pushing its fake covid19 cures and treatments is dumb, even if it is ethically reprehensible.
Guy is a genius level troll in manipulating people and controlling the message. People didn’t get it in 2016, and they don’t get it now.
We’re in for another 4 years if people focus on whatever he twittered today and not their own message. That’s not an election strategy.
It's not just messaging, it's backed up with force. You just haven't experienced that first-hand yet.
This is a horrible attribute in a president, who constantly has to deal with an array of issues that no one person could ever be expert in.
Would you say the same thing about NNT or Socrates?
> The man who said "The only thing I know is that I know nothing" is a far cry from the man who said "I know more than the generals do".
But I didn't think of it at the time.
Whether it's the anti-intellectualist trend that lurks in some segments of the US population, or the way that the Republican party successfully intertwined themselves into American religious institutions several decades ago to make Republican party loyalty be perceived as an odd form of "cultural-Christian" piety by many who were swept up by the "religious Right" and "moral majority" movements, or the straight-up disinformation campaigns targeted at the most willful audiences....not one factor was tied to Trump being a good people leader or an intelligent strategist. It's more that he was the guy that happened to be there when a confluence of other efforts came to fruition, and he was crazy/manipulable/stupid enough to be useful for the role of "candidate".
It is easy to square; it's social class. It's very important to a rather large segment of the country that it feel intellectually superior. He provokes them into talking about how superior they are, and that shores up his base.
One further dynamic.. people in the media and professional classes can be destroyed by using the wrong word or by speculating off-handedly. That is why they flip out when Trump does it. It's partially envy of his freedom.
The board is obviously talking about cleaning your living area/homes but uhhh the president thought otherwise.
Edit: Here is an article with the image: https://www.cnet.com/news/trump-suggests-injecting-disinfect...
I mean even if UBI and/or ozonetherapy don't work at all and are wildly dangerous, at least Trump knew what they were, which makes him smarter than everyone posting about how they don't even know what he's talking about.
There is zero evidence that Trump has any clue UIB exists.
"And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."
1) Trump knew about UBI, a fringe medical practice used primarily in Russia decades ago
2) Trump heard them talking just moments before about how UV light disinfects outdoor surfaces and kills the virus, and that using chemical disinfectants also killed the virus, and then proceeded to talk about how you could inject disinfectant or put UV light inside the body.
Occam's Razor would point us towards the latter. It's just a lot less convoluted to believe he was talking about the same topic the entire prior discussion had been around than to believe he's talking about an obscure and unproven medical practice decades removed from use.
There are people who do it both ways. As another commenter pointed you, you can buy devices that do the same thing that work inside the body:
The whole quote:
“ Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. Supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? It would be interesting to check that. That you’re gonna have to use medical doctors with.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests...
But using that quote to gleefully claim that Trump is suggesting that people inject themselves (which is all your see online right now, esp Twitter and Reddit) is a textbook case of the least charitable interpretation.
If anyone was actually concerned about people injecting themselves with Lysol, they wouldn't publish headlines that put those words in Trump's mouth because you certainly don't get that from listening to the video clip. He's telling his advisor to "look into it", some off-the-cuff dumb hunch.
This kind of coverage does nothing but drive media ad impressions and the division between the voters. It also secures a 2020 Trump victory by being so dishonest.
“My concern is that people will die. People will think this is a good idea,” Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told The Washington Post. “This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous.”
Lysol is worried about it: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/do-not-inject-disinfecta...
And they have cause to be, after the last time Trump spoke about chloroquine and people listening to him consumed aquarium chemicals and died as a result.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/health/arizona-coronavirus-ch...
The media has a responsibility to report information of medical experts and no responsibility to be charitable to the President to save him from embarrassment here.
I can guarantee their comms department spent a long time looking at his speech and the fallout from it before deciding that they had to issue this to prevent people from dying.
https://www.rb.com/media/news/2020/april/improper-use-of-dis...
In the video linked you can see that he clearly mentioned "disinfectant" then suggested injecting it. There's no other way to spin that.
Disinfect vs disinfectant is a red herring.
Given his mention of disinfectants at the same time, it's far more likely they just told him how they disinfect surfaces like doorknobs and countertops and he ran with it.