I’m writing a book on stupidity. Here are notes from the last 24 hours:

An idiot king for idiot voters.

Trump’s Razor.  He’s not crazy like a fox, he’s just crazy.  He’s not acting stupid as some sort of kayfabe or schtick, he is stupid.  Profoundly so.  That’s why people love him – because he’s just like them.  Every complicated problem has a simple solution, involving “common sense,” rather than a bunch of arrogant experts claiming it’s so complicated. 

It’s easy . . . if you’re stupid, which most people are, because most people are mediocre at thinking. Mediocre is just what people are at almost anything, since ability in regard to to almost anything is almost always normally distributed, although people use mediocre as an insult under the hyper-competitive social conditions of contemporary capitalism.

Asking whether Trump believes what he says is true is like asking if a science fiction novel set thousands of years into the future is historically accurate.  It’s a category error.  Trump doesn’t try to tell the truth and he doesn’t lie, because both of those acts (attempting to make truthful or false statements) require a level of mental coherence that he has no interest in attempting to achieve.  This is Harry Frankfurt’s famous definition of bullshit as being more inimical to the truth than lying. 

Trump is what C.S. Lewis describes in his autobiography of a posh private English school when he says a certain boy was known as a “rattle,” in that he had no interest in whether what he was saying was true or false, he just said whatever seemed advantageous or amusing to say at the moment, with no regard for its potential truth or falsehood.

The tariffs against Canada and Mexico are the launching a massive trade war for literally no reason, other than that Trump is just an extremely stupid man.

LGM comment (2/2/2025)

“Even as herrenvolk democracy the Trump regime is profoundly damaging to any constituency other than plutocrats who mostly care about hurting people. He is economically serving no broad constituency whatsoever and only providing culture war bread and circuses while he goes about systematically destroying everything that makes America a prosperous nation.

It would be completely unbelievable in a work of fiction., Even in reality it’s almost unbelievable.

Ironically this is the one thing that proves that Trump really is in control because nobody else, from Miller to Musk, would support this completely idiotic idea. This is the authentic Trumpian stupidity and we’re all going to pay for it.”

The key concept at the core of the stupid person’s world view is this: These apparently complicated problems are actually very simple.  There’s a simple solution – one weird trick – that solves the problem perfectly.  All you need is common sense, and an unwillingness to be fooled by the so-called experts.  Thus Trump thinks that economic strategies that were discredited 130 years ago are actually very simple solutions to the problems of international trade, because everything has a simple solution if we would just use common sense.  This is the stupid person’s Nicene Creed.

RFK Jr. on public health is similar:  All illness is a product of poor lifestyle choices.  It really is that simple. All the pseudo-scientific malarky about the supposed necessity of vaccines is just a smoke screen for the profit motives of Big Pharma. 

Stupid people love simple answers to complex questions, because such answers validate their world view.  The entire university system is therefore bad as an axiomatic matter, because universities exist on the basis of the assumption that common sense is often wrong.

Fascism is a subcategory of stupidity.

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