If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job.
Isn't that a bit like a wooly mammoth? In theory it could exist but in practice you're not going to find anybody that is both mentally capable and at the same time stupid enough to eat his slop.
That leaves evil enough and there are plenty of those...
Whoever suggested that using Tariffs to provide a handle to move stocks that they could use to trade, I very much doubt it came from Trump. That was provided the means to keep all the greedy grubbers in the Republican party onside whilst they hid Trump's involvement with Epstein so the train could keep running.
Musk is evil. But he's clever, he knew to over pay for Twitter so he could use it to help swing elections and put himself in political power. He failed to get the response to his salute he expected, and knew enough to slink off into the background (or listen to his advisors telling him that). Amazingly he's still making money hand-over-fist from USA's regime. You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
They've absolutely destroyed USA, there is no Constitution now, there's not even lip service to war crime treaties. But there's a lot of intelligent people onboard that we underestimate at our peril.
I currently believe this was accidental on his part, that he was manoeuvred into overpaying by the previous owners.
Nevertheless, I would still count Musk as "intelligent". Not as intelligent as his boosters like to claim (obviously, given the boosters treat him as a god amongst men), but intelligent.
> You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
Well, they literally did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Tesla_vandalism
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/05/musk-trump-feud-2024-electi...
and they're pretty bad news. But - Trump is not unique in being ridden by interested parties, and in particular, powerful donors or groups-of-donors. His predecessor, Biden, used to be known as "The Senator from MBNA" (That's the large credit card company based in Delaware), due to his devotion to their interests:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/08/senator-mbna-byron-yo...
and his winning presidential campaign had plenty of funding from Billionaires, although not in such individually high numbers; and from the financial sector more generally:
https://www.investopedia.com/top-donors-to-biden-2020-campai...
and we could go back and look at how Obama's cabinet was pretty much picked by Citigroup:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html
etc.
Also, looking at war crimes and crimes against humanity - the US has done worse than it's doing now, in the past, even if we count Gaza as the responsibility of the Biden and Trump presidencies. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, East Timor indirectly, all of its South America meddling... yes, there used to be more lip service to the avoidance of international crimes, to the avoidance of outright unprovoked aggression, to the UN, and Trump has stripped most of those remains away, I'll grant you - but he stripped was was rotten and fractured already.
Stupidity has none.
You can derail stupid towards something. Even de-stupid it. That does not work with motivated people, even less evil ones.
Why isn't it evil to have ultimate power and use it to be just be greedy, self absorbed, and vain in the face of pain and suffering? That's the prime motive of most stupid people I know. How do you derail that towards something positive and de-stupid it? People have thought they could do that with Trump to achieve their objectives for years, only for them to end up disgraced, diminished, and discarded.