After the whole George W/Iraq episode, I started thinking that a degree in world history (probably a post-grad degree) should be mandatory for US presidential candidates. Now, obviously, things are much, much worse. As such, if someone asked Trump or one of his followers - regarding the middle east - something like “have you considered the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire” etc, what sort of answer would they come up with?
“What does furniture have to do with this?” or “we have to do this because of how we’re getting screwed in the production of ottomobiles and the rust-belt blah blah blah, Canada, blah, blah, …”
In all seriousness, do they have any understanding or knowledge of the background to all this?
Well Trump is so stupid that he doesn’t realize that he is going to need all of those Palestinians to be waiters and dishwashers for his newly proposed Gaza Strip resort. Oh, and strippers to go along with the Gaza Strip concept. No wonder his casinos failed.
I know a considerable number of smart and highly-educated Trump supporters. It’s not about IQ, it’s about emotion. Emotion has always been a far more powerful human driver than logic. Just like how engineers tend to be conspiracy theorists.
But the question is not about the supporters, is about the supported. Trump for starters, his court of sycophants next.
I think Trump is an idiot, too many instances of him saying completely idiotic things for no gain give us plenty of proof.
The rest… many are a bit less idiotic and equally ignorant, and then there are the dangerous ones.
Huh? I work with quite a few engineers and I haven’t heard a single CT from them (plus, I’m an engineer). On the other hand, my maga relatives (not engineers) seem to have a high affinity for CTs and “doing their research”.
We’ve had a couple of presidents who were engineers. They proved less than stellar, not because the believed in conspiracy theories, but because they were stuck in the engineer’s mindset that with the right adjustments and maintenance, things should progress rationally.
This is one of the reasons lawyers are good at politics.
We deal with people in stressful situations, who change their minds quickly in response to sometimes rational, sometimes irrational, prompts.
You put up a witness to testify and they change their story, or stuff comes out in cross-exam of your witness that they’ve never told you. Then you have to see if you can salvage your case.
Lawyers have to be adaptable to circumstances and changes, while accepting that some of the inputs (and some of the outputs!) will be irrational.
All of that is good training for the chaos that politics can be.
You elected Mr. Haney for mayor, Alf and Ralph for Congress, and Hank Kimball as their opposition.
What in the Wide Wide World Of Sports did you think was going to happen?
I’d like to believe that the people now in power are stupid and ignorant and will eventually cause their own downfall. Unfortunately, I think they’re more in the mold of an Adolph Eichmann, who was neither stupid nor ignorant (despite his protestations to the contrary on this last count). Rather, he was very good at what he did and it was catastrophic for the world. And there were many others like him.
His bunch could easily have won in the long term. Some still wish they did. Disappointing that this is the world we live in.
Trump has a BS degree (seems appropriate) in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It doesn’t mean he’s smart; it just means he lasted four years. He’s clever and manipulative and a sociopath, which makes him a difficult enemy to deal with.
If by ‘sycophants’ you mean his appointees:
RFK: Law degree
Hegseth: Princeton and Harvard
Tulsi Gabbard: no degrees
Pam Bondi: Law degree
Linda McMahon: BA
Kristi Noem: BA
Marco Rubio: Law degree
I’d guess many others also have an education. Doesn’t mean they’re not deluded or just plain stupid.
As for the Trump voter, I think most of them are single-issue voters. Eggs cost too much! The gays! Messicans! Doesn’t make them stupid, just narrowly focused. Trump is an asshole, but he’s good at manipulating people. Deny, deny, deny, even in the face of overwhelming evidence: this is what he was taught by his father’s lawyer.
Because he was born into a system designed to produce that result for people of his race and economic class. He’s failed again and again, and been propped up and shielded from the consequences again and again.
If anything being stupid and ignorant is an advantage as it has kept him from worrying about consequences that were never going to apply to him anyway.
So do I. It seems to me that a lot of them have the Sovereign Citizen mentality
I know what is being told me is not true.
There is ample evidence what I’m being told is not true.
But it matches what I want reality to be
Therefore I will convince myself it’s true
I will proselytize that “truth” to everyone to convince them I am correct.
There may also be a significant overlap between this and short-sighted selfishness, in that they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about long term, global consequences - eg who cares if two million Palestinians have their tragedies spectacularly prolonged, if Russia overwhelms Ukraine, if NATO/EU is forced to defend itself against the US, as long as eggs aren’t too expensive this year.
Not sure if they technically qualify as “engineers” but the maintenance staff (HVAC/electrical) at my office building have espoused some utterly batshit CTs over the years, many with more than a whiff of antisemitism about them.