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Comment by southernplaces7 | Hacker News Reader

It's partly because a large number of people smugly hold such a simplistic, stupid and completely unreflective view of the guy and the political/social currents he's both ridden and manipulated, that he has been able to get so far in politics. Trump is all kinds of unpleasant things, but a screaming orangutan of rage and stupidity he isn't.

Even as it stands, his entire political career since 2016 is a very unique chapter in U.S. political history, which will be judged as such in many complex ways across the coming decades. This is not simply the result of an incredible number of coincidences favoring a complete, screaming idiot.

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He’s basically a variant of Andrew Jackson [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson], but scammier.

What always has blown me away is how many people insist Trump is dumb, while clearly being manipulated by him.

I’m no fan, but the dude is clearly crafty AF and has balls the size of basketballs. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be in the white house again making everyone miserable.

I think that's a common phenomenon that I see among both right-wing and left-wing Americans. Both are convinced that the other side's leaders are morons and refuse to entertain the possibility that the other side is full of intelligent people with different, even alien, priorities.

There are plenty of both screaming orangutans and postmodern anti-humanists out there, but the ones that end up in positions of power instead of the homeless shelter are there because they have far more intelligence than the average person. They may be deficient in technical knowledge, but that's because they spent their time learning how to manipulate minds instead of learning how to manipulate bits or atoms.

He is. I mean he is rage and hatred. Is he stupid? No worse then dumb he's lazy. Hes smart at scamming people and selling himself but he has neither knowledge of how policy can theoretically improve people's lives and is too lazy to try to learn about it. Luckily or unluckily he's also had at carrying things out, see the whole infrastructure week debacle compared to president Biden who passed two large infrastructure bills.

>No worse then dumb he's lazy.

If you really think this given Trump's trajectory, visibly tireless and constant efforts to make something even more dramatic of himself (as repugnant as some of those efforts are to behold) and his self-serving successes across many years, now multiplied via one genuinely remarkable inroad into mainstream, top-level U.S politics just a decade after being considered a joke by most of the established political landscape, then i'd say you're being lazy about very basic research and dumb in forming a cliched caricature of someone you dislike mainly because you dislike them.

He is a cliched caricature.

Just because he succeeded doesn't make him not a joke. What it says about our country ... well its not particularly good and I don't like to think about it.

Im sure he can hustle for himself although tireless and constant are not words I I would use especially as he's gotten even older. But his intellectual laziness that has been well documented. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/29/politics/trump-intelligen...

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