Trump Doesn't Seem Very Smart After All

Is Donald Trump smart enough to be president? There is a lot of evidence suggesting the answer to that question is "No!"

An intelligent person can make distinctions between different things: true things and false things, for example, or good things and bad things. The ability to judge and evaluate is part of the definition of being smart. A person who can't examine two different things and see how they are similar and how they differ may have some wonderful qualities but it is certain that he or she is not very smart.

Trump has a lot of trouble making these kinds of distinctions, which suggests he is not operating at a very high level of intelligence, certainly not at the level we need in a president.

The most recent example of this came during an interview with Bill O'Reilly where Trump was asked if he respected Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and he said he did. O'Reilly came back by saying: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.” Trump's response: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump has said so many outrageous things in the last 18 months that we have become jaded: we do not notice how shocking this answer really is. Trump is denying that there is any essential difference in the moral standing of the United States as compared to that of Russia. He can't really tell the difference between a country that is based on a belief in freedom and equal rights - the country of Washington and Lincoln, and another country that is based on dictatorship and terror - the country of Lenin and Stalin.

Now it is true that the United States has done bad things in the world. There has often been a terrible gap between the ideals of the United States and the reality. We have to keep working to improve and we have to keep moving in the direction of our best beliefs and principles, but for Trump to not see the difference between the United States, which has fought on the right side of history and Russia, which has fought on the wrong side, is very worrisome.

This strange and scary moral confusion we see in Trump has been seen before. In an interview during the election Joe Scarborough told Trump about Putin: “He kills journalists that don’t agree with him.” Trump's response: “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe."

For Trump there is simply no moral distinction between the United States and Russia! How can a man with that kind of moral blindness possibly make good decisions?

Other Republican leaders have no difficulty seeing the moral difference between the United States and Russia:

1. Senator Rubio tweeted: “When has a Democratic political activist been poisoned by the GOP or vice versa? We are not the same as Putin.”
2. Senator McConnell said that Putin is a "former KGB agent and a thug" and “I don’t think there’s any equivalency between the way Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does."
3. Senator McCain agrees that Putin is "a murderer and a thug."

How come our president can't bring himself to speak with this same kind kind of moral clarity and moral intelligence?

There are many other examples of Trump's inability to make crucial distinctions. He has a hard time separating fact from fantasy, for example.

1. He spent years suggesting that President Obama wasn't really an American until suddenly reversing himself during the election.
2. In the final days of the campaign Trump raised the ludicrous possibility that Ted Cruz's father had been involved in the Kennedy assassination.
3. Now he claims that millions of people voted illegally last election day even though he has not presented any evidence to support such a claim.

How can a man with such limited ability to evaluate whether claims are true or false make good decisions for the country?

If Trump is too confused to distinguish between true and false, too baffled to separate good from evil, too lost in a fog to tell better from worse, then he is surely not smart enough to be president.

Check out this article for more on Trump's latest outrageous Putin comment: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/05/donald-trump-repeats-his-respect-for-killer-vladimir-putin

***
[Check out this great new book about the 2016 election.]
[If you want to support "Anything Smart" just click on book links like the one below to buy your books. "Anything Smart" will receive a commission. Thanks!]

***

Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway