this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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He rubber stamped Clarence Thomas through the judiciary committee and bought the Bush "WMDs" lie hook, line, and sinker. Also had his hands all over the Patriot Act of 2001 (and it's iterative reauthorizations) and the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005, which accelerated us into our modern fascist state.
Evil or Stupid, take your pick. But the man who delivered Strom Thurmond's eulogy was one fucked choice for party leader.
I'll spot you Trump as "useful idiot", but he's been very successful at getting what he wants (money, fame, power, a slavishly loyal paramilitary intent on ethnically cleansing the country).
Maybe the US is just predisposed to delivering those results and Trump was dealt a winning hand at birth. But you can only call the guy cleaning up all the chips at the table "stupid" for so long before you start looking like a sore loser.
He knows exactly what he needs to know in order to get what he desires. And they're been nothing I've seen, to date, to suggest he's less savvy than any of the "smart" politicians he crushed on the way to the top.
His success is on the back of 40+ years of the hollowing out of government by the duopoly of neoliberal politics. He stands on the shoulders of midgets...or weaklings, or corruption, or a pile of invertebrates or something.
Trump was absolutely dealt a winning hand at birth. He was born a rich heir to a real estate mogul in New York. He failsonned, grifted, and bullied his way through multiple (mostly failed) businesses, failed up, and lived his entire adult life during an era of rapid capital expansion.
Without his riches, as you concede, he would not have the juice he needed to make a splash on the political stage.
If you want to call me a sore loser for stating clearly the plainly visible fact that Donald J. Trump is stupid, then so be it.
The guy thought that annotations on an "explainer" photograph were tattoos despite some of the annotations floating off of the guy's knuckles. He mused aloud in front of a national audience about injecting disinfectants to cure COVID. He's a stupid fucking idiot.
Like a Cordyceps, hijacking the brain of its host and spurring it on to engage in self-destructive activity. And you can reasonably claim that cordyceps is dumb as shit. But you can't argue it isn't getting what it wants.
Right. Although I keep seeing liberals cling to the theory that a Gore Presidency or a Hillary win in '16 (or even '08) or a second Biden term would have somehow averted our modern moment, rather than getting here by other means. What it consistently overlooks is the habit of Democrats in leadership - even when they've got the supermajorities and the friendly courts and the big municipal governments and major businesses in alignment - tidying things up and then sitting on their hands until they can pass power back to the fascists.
FFS, Bush Jr had the entire finance system handed to him on a silver platter in 2008. He passed control over to Obama, who politely helps the biggest plutocrats in the country get their books back in the black, and then hands everything right back to the crooks who bankrupted the system. The '08/'09 handover set the stage for our modern economic moment. Guys like Theil and Musk and Bezos couldn't exist in a world without Mega-Banks hyper-inflating tech sector asset prices. Tech monopolies are what created the social media that elevated Trump's fascist movement. And here we are.
If you want to talk about a politician being a dumb-fuck, you have to wonder at what Barry was thinking when he got in bed with both the Wall Street scorpions (who would immediately stab him in the back in the mid-year cycle) and Silicon Valley (which twisted in the wind for another decade before firmly aligning with MAGA).
Trump found some useful propaganda to circulate in order to get people to break his way. By the time he was done, it was the Democrats where trying to explain what an AI generated knuckle-tattoo looks like while Trump was happily cashing the checks Bidencrats signed to unleash his ICE paramilitary across the country.
Totally agree.
I think he had a very common liberal, capitalism-sized blind spot. I'm willing to admit I had the same one at the time. He also was definitely beholden to interests and was 0% of the communist / socialist that everyone continually pretended (and still pretends) he was.
One of his team of lackeys presented him the annotated photograph and he confused it with reality. He's oceans worth of stupid and there are countless examples of this.