I actually think Trump is pretty dam close to average intelligence. He honestly seems to think it was impressive that he passed a basic cognitive function test and doesn't think people like Biden or an average person could. He just seems like someone who would be completely overwhelmed by an SAT math question.

I definitely agree his big issue is temperament. It's a far cry from people like Biden or Hilary who were trusted with high level jobs by a very successful president. No republican like Cruz or Rubio would have trusted Trump to be VP or Sec of State in a million years. He probably couldn't even pass the basic financial vetting portion.

Guys, I'm not claiming that Trump is some sort of genius. I said his intelligence was below average for a U.S. president. I simply was noting that his intelligence (or lack thereof) wasn't the main explanation for why he was a terrible president.

In a weird way, blaming Trump's presidency on a lack of intelligence gives him a pass of sorts. In other words, if I thought Trump had the best interests of the country at heart, but that he simply lacked the intelligence to reach the right answers, I wouldn't necessarily despise him. I wouldn't vote for him, but I wouldn't necessarily despise him. But he didn't have the best interests of the country at heart.

I should have added that Trump's complete lack of an ethical or moral compass was another significant reason why he was a terrible president.

I think as Trump has aged he has gone from slightly above average to slightly below average.

Young Trump never said things like ' I have the best words' and would have adeptly mocked someone who spoke so baselessly.

In terms of other POTUS he is at the very low end. He and GWBjr would likely be battling it out for the lowest score.

I don't agree with Lozen's whataboutism as I have not seen Biden say stuff that is so painfully dumb, but what the right likes to point at is that Biden stutters and part of stuttering is long pregnant pauses as your brain organizes its thoughts and you then speak. That searching for words leads to gaff's certainly but that is different than an intelligence base line.

I don't think anybody really disagrees with you except maybe on the claim that he isn't below average for the US population. You might be right that he isn't. But I and some others think it's a definite possibility. Something that isn't the case for Biden, Bush etc. And his lack of intelligence is completely orthoginal to whether he has the country's best interest at heart. As the Big Lie shows, he clearly doesn't give a crap at all and soothing his wounded ego after losing is more important than the country to him.

This isn't about intelligence.

Donald Trump is batsh*t crazy. Completely and totally insane.

I wouldn't doubt that by now he believes that he was cheated out of the election. Even though the only one who clearly cheated was himself. Along with his Russian puppeteers. Perhaps Donald Trump believes that everybody cheats because that is all he knows to do. Perhaps it is just projection.

I believe that Donald Trump now lives in his own little fantasy world where the only people who are let in are those who are willing to support his version of the truth. Anyone else is summarily dismissed. Including an Attorney General who was his first public supporter and likely Russia colluder and another Attorney General who repeatedly lied for him in order to have the Russia investigation which absolutely pegged Trump as an obstructer of justice and likely co-conspirator, dismissed.

Amazingly that includes a large % of what remains as the Republican party.

+1

https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/...s-116920389908

The last several posts...

The exact point on the intelligence part is that all the stupid, inane things everyone points out, and not being fit for POTUS, is a reflection of mental disorders

Him being full of himself is not reflective of intelligence. I mean some of that is, but it's largely narcissism, or NPD. The OCD is his compulsive behavior. He can't control himself. Remember all those flags when he met with Kim? That's OCD. A normal person would say let's have a few flags for the cameras. He prefers gaudy, so he demands 30. He doesn't even realize how weird and awkward it looks, or does and simply doesn't care. He just has to have it done that way. He thinks that displaying power and imposing his will is way way more impressing on others than it really is. It makes him look like an idiot, but that's reflective of his mental instability. Intelligence doesn't really have anything to do with it

Also, we can point out all kinds of hella bad business decisions he's made, the corruption, the taxes thing, but at the same time he got all of media to give him free rent inside all their heads, has a cult following that ofc blows all of our minds (mine included), and actually did have some success in the business and real estate world. It's the impulsiveness and rash decisions that led to failure. And of course The Apprentice, the Trump name, and his own personality was leveraged for lots and lots of money

People with average IQs, which is like, 100, are, like, really really incompetent. We're talking win the lottery and just lose it all within a year type incompetence. Trump won the lottery born in the right family and went on to become the GOAT fish on a heaters we've ever seen

The weird thing where he needed two hands to drink a glass of water. Walking down the ramp oddly slowly. His relationships with...everyone. It takes some semblance of intelligence to manipulate people and situations to your benefit, not a genius mastermind. But a lot of the insults he gets, driving people up a wall, the hatred from ripping people off throughout his life, being devoid of empathy...All mental disorder, not stupidity in terms of low intelligence. Stable genius and all that. Literally a classic example of extreme narcissism. The victimhood...All of it

I just think a lot of people don't really see the distinction. Maybe this is a dumb, pointless tangent, but I think maybe it's useful when maybe dealing with others in life who exhibit the same traits. You can really help someone if you spot they have OCD or just some erratic behavior, identify it for them...You can literally save their life and/or drastically improve it. Mental disorder, untreated, can be a death sentence for a lot of people and it really doesn't have to be. It can also make one realize a person literally can't change and you need to gtfo before they drag you down with the impending damage they're about to do

Well said, TD. I don't know if Trump is of average intelligence, a little below, or a little above, but I doubt he's an outlier on either end. Mental disorders seem to be pretty clearly the issue with Trump.

I'm a psychiatrist, and what you are describing here really doesn't sound like OCD. If he always needed exactly 30 flags because it relieved some intrusive thought that something bad would otherwise happen, then maybe. But as described it sounds more like narcissism/grandiosity and poor taste

I'm not a psychiatrist but I had the same reaction re OCD.

There isn't any question about Trump's narcissism. Whether it is a "mental disorder" largely depends on where we as a society decide to draw the line on what constitutes NPD.

You can hate Donald all you want but for this you gotta give him credit.
Although imo this could have been some type of chess move to look good idk.
He pardoned a guy on his last day in office. Great story. Love the guy from the innocence project:



more about the innocence project:

Issuing pardons right before you leave office is actually pretty standard for U.S. presidents.

the conversation we were having was whether Trump has above average intelligence. I'm not sure he does. Of cpurse he was an awful president for many reasons and his relative stupidity at these stakes was minor part of it. Nobody disagrees with that.

This is the main point for me. The world is full of decent human beings of varying levels of intelligence. Trump is not one of them. Trump's personality flaws and his general lack of decency are the primary reasons why he was a terrible president.

W was a terrible president. And I'll listen to arguments that he was worse than Trump because of Iraq. But I do believe that he thought he was acting in the national interest, however misguided he may have been.

Trump very obviously does not have the best interests of the country at heart. Trump does not care what happens to the country if it benefits him personally. He is the only president in U.S. history who lacked even a passing concern for the national interest.

Didn't know this.

How do you rate Nixon?

As compared to Trump? In general?

This, this, a thousand times this.

You seem like a nice guy with your heart in the right place, but I've lost track of the number of times you drop into a thread with a hot take about a topic that you clearly don't know a lot about, other than what you've discovered in a recent Internet rabbit hole you explored.

Trump is actually low on the pardons given

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...-commutations/

both, if you want or in general. I recently heard a few things about him.

lol dont know what to reply to that. There is of course some truth to this.
The story is how that pardon came to place is amazing though.

That guy was in jail for 30 years, innocent! He got set up, drug charges, 30 years. Trump asked the guy from the innocence project to bring him someone
on drug charges. He asked specifically for non violent drug charges.

There is no reason to flame Trump for issuing this pardon. But there is also no reason to act like he did something unprecedented.

Nixon was a terrible president. Widespread public distrust of government is directly traceable to Nixon presidency. Nixon's moral compass was in the range of Trump's moral compass. Nixon's paranoia and intolerance of criticism was in the range of Trump's. But Nixon was quite a bit smarter than Trump. And he had more respect for norms than Trump (which isn't saying much).

Nixon would not have attempted to undermine democracy in the way that Trump did in the last three months of his presidency.

If Nixon thought he could get away with it I sort of doubt there’s anything he wouldn’t have done to hold on to power.