Here's how it ends (to save you the trouble of clicking through to FB):
Not only did he have money, his world was made up of other people with money. Much of his success has come from convincing others to invest their own money in his projects. And "people with money" isn't just heirs and successful businessmen. It includes the managers of the huge slush funds of various kinds: intelligence and propaganda services of various nations, organized crime groups, offshore banking and money launderers. And the world of these slush funds is the lawless, untaxed deregulated world of globalization. Trump knows how to work in this world the way we do not.
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With all the things wrong with Trump, why is his dumbness the final zinger for so many people? He's brutal and malignant and his goals are all wrong, but what we talk about is his toupee and his IQ.
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Addendum 10.18.19: Emerson has now amplified and elaborated:
Trump has not gotten to where he is through testing well, filing applications, and credentialization. People who have been schooled that way are hard put to understand people who didn't, like Basquiat, Amazonian tribesmen, and Trump. Trump has succeeded in a difficult field and while he started on third base, he's objectively done far better than most heirs.
My basic points ar the following, and to these points the question of Trump's actual stupidity is somewhat irrelevant:
1. What kind of nation and what kind of world is this in which someone like Trump can be as successful as he is? I think that the deregulated, lawless globalized world of the enormous international slush funds is part of the answer, and the degradation of the American political world (caused to a considerable degree by slush fund control of the media, the political parties, and to a sad degree, the university) is the other part. In this world Trump is smart and we are dumb. (How many people understand what happened in 2008? How many people even know that the 2008 crash was a huge disaster of great historical importance? How many people know anything about big money's corruption of the university?)
2. With all the things wrong with Trump, why is his dumbness the final zinger for so many people? He's brutal and malignant and his goals are all wrong, but what we talk about is his toupee and his IQ.
Why? Because in the schooled, credentialed world, dumbness is the disqualifying sin. You can be brutal and vicious, and you're still part of that world. But if you're dumb, you are cast into the outer darkness and become an unperson -- like most Americans. But Trump didn't rise via credentialization and doesn't care. (And neither do many of the dumb voters).
America's most wrongheaded moves during my lifetime were made by very smart people from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the U of Chicago -- deregulation, privatization, the militarization of policing, the exemption of big money from taxation, the looting of Russia, the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, and so on.
When people pile up up evidence that Trump is dumb, they're pissing against the wind. First, there's evidence that he is not dumb in his areas of concern. Second, my main points (# 1 and # 2 above) are unaffected if Trump really is dumb. And finally, if he really is dumb, a codicil is needed: why were the brilliant, highly educated managers of major investment banks dumb enough to entrust billions of dollars to a moron? (His bankruptcies don't count, BTW. They're normal in his biz, and in fact the whole world banking system went bankrupt in 2008 and had to be rescued by heroic government efforts, at the expense of the victims of the banks.)
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