How dumb is Trump
Donald Trump is, without question, one of the most profoundly unintelligent figures ever to rise to such immense power. His entire public persona is a towering monument to ignorance, inflated by ego and surrounded by a fog of delusion so thick it could choke out the sun. The man’s understanding of the world is a cocktail of half-read headlines, Fox News slogans, conspiracy theories, and gut-level reactions masquerading as strategy.
He speaks in sentence fragments and grade-school vocabulary, often repeating the same three or four words—“tremendous,” “disaster,” “sad,” “fake”—as if his brain short-circuits at anything above a fifth-grade reading level. Studies analyzing his speech have confirmed this, but anyone who’s ever sat through one of his “rallies” could have told you the same after ten seconds. He once bragged about having “the best words,” and then spent four years proving he didn’t know what most of them meant. His language is a stew of word salad and self-obsession, laced with lies, mispronunciations, and nonsensical tangents that veer wildly off-topic, as if his thoughts were chasing a squirrel on a cocaine bender.
His disdain for reading is legendary. Multiple aides, officials, and even his own ghostwriters have confirmed that he doesn’t read briefing memos, doesn’t study, and doesn’t listen to experts. He watches cable news as if it were a sacred scripture and bases policy decisions on what some talking head said while he was half-listening between Diet Cokes. He has the intellectual attention span of a YouTube ad and the curiosity of a burned-out goldfish. When it came to complex global issues—climate change, nuclear diplomacy, pandemics—his responses were so devoid of nuance, empathy, or even coherence that foreign leaders were either confused, amused, or horrified.
The idea that Trump is a “business genius” is one of the greatest scams ever sold to the American public. He inherited hundreds of millions of dollars, bankrupted multiple casinos (an almost mathematically impossible feat), failed at everything from airlines to vodka to steaks, and managed to lose more money in a decade than nearly any other individual taxpayer on record. He even turned his name into a brand, only to have that brand become synonymous with failure and fraud. Trump University was such an obvious grift that he had to pay $25 million to settle fraud lawsuits, and he once “sold” stakes in his buildings to investors only to walk away with the cash while the businesses collapsed behind him.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the world needed intelligence, science, and leadership. Instead, Trump suggested injecting disinfectant into the body. He downplayed the virus, contradicted health experts, refused to wear a mask, and turned a global health emergency into a partisan carnival of misinformation. Thousands of lives could have been saved had he simply shut up and let experts speak, but his pathological need to be the smartest person in the room—despite not being the smartest person in most elevators—ensured the U.S. had one of the worst responses in the world.
His ignorance doesn’t end at science. He failed history on a nearly mythic scale, once claiming that the Continental Army “took over the airports” during the American Revolution—an event that occurred more than a century before the Wright brothers even built the first plane. He thought Belgium was a city. He asked if Finland was part of Russia. He reportedly couldn’t identify the difference between the Kurds and the Quds Force. In meetings with world leaders, he had to be shown pictures with big-font names like a child being taught flashcards.
Even his sense of ethics and morality is disturbingly dim. He sided with dictators, insulted war heroes, and showed more affection for strongmen like Kim Jong-un than for his own intelligence agencies. He undermined democratic institutions because he didn’t understand how they worked—and more importantly, didn’t care. When he lost the 2020 election, he simply decided the truth didn’t matter. He repeated lies, fueled a conspiracy, and incited a mob to storm the Capitol. For him, facts are optional, and consequences are things other people deal with.
Trump is not just uninformed—he is willfully ignorant. He wears his stupidity like a badge of honor, constantly rejecting expertise in favor of gut instinct, even when his gut is wrong more often than not. He is allergic to introspection and incapable of complex thought. He confuses arrogance with intelligence, repetition with wisdom, and volume with truth.
If you gave him a map, a calculator, and a book, he’d lose the map, break the calculator, and use the book as a coaster. He is the Dunning-Kruger effect personified: too incompetent to know he’s incompetent. The only thing more dangerous than Trump’s stupidity is how confidently he wields it—like a toddler with a flamethrower, gleefully setting fire to norms, facts, and institutions while believing he’s saving the world.
Donald Trump isn’t just a dumb guy who got lucky—he’s a dumb guy who convinced millions that being dumb is somehow patriotic. He’s a cautionary tale dressed in a cheap suit, stained with ketchup, ranting on stage about things he doesn’t understand, while the world watches in disbelief.