Part One of how “Trump is an idiot, and the mainstream press is covering up for him” focused on his cluelessness about trade deficits and interest rates, and on his ridiculous new idea for his Arc de Trump. If you haven’t read it yet, please read it first. Here’s Part Two:
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It is really quite stunning how often Trump praises his own intelligence – and stability. Why would that be? Because he’s an idiot.
Last week, he did it in the context of the growing concern among actual smart people that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated.
This is how he began a post on his social media website last week: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
(He added that people who oppose data centers and AI are “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists [sic], Traitors, and Leakers.” This is a sign of his derangement more than his stupidity, but I digress.)
Even if Trump were smart, what he wrote makes no sense.
The New York Times ran an article headlined “Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.”
Surely they would give readers some indication of the stupid, know-nothing nature of his comments, right? Wrong.
“With the posts,” Jonathan Swan and Michael Gold wrote, “Mr. Trump inserted himself into an intensifying national debate over how to govern a rapidly evolving technology.”
Finally, in the bottom half of their story – in a grudging “critics say” paragraph – they quoted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer noting, accurately, that “even if we had a high IQ president right now, and we surely don’t, it wouldn’t be enough.”
It’s important to note that there is one area in which Trump is a savvy operator and highly accomplished: enriching himself. As the Washington Post and the Guardian reported after his post, Trump’s family and friends are heavily invested in data centers and artificial intelligence.
Trump’s Favorite Word Does Not Mean What He Thinks It Means
Tariffs have been the defining element of Trump’s economic policy in his second term. He loves them. “I always say ‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” he said at a rally just hours after his inauguration.
And how does he think tariffs work?
He repeatedly insists that they are paid for by the target country. Here’s a typical statement, from an August 2024 political rally:
A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. That’s the way it is, whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say, “Oh, it’s a tax on us.” No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country. It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs, and it’s a tax that doesn’t affect our country.
But “a lot of people” are apparently way smarter than he is, because he’s completely wrong. A tariff is paid for by the American company that is importing the goods in question, and then in turn passed on to American consumers who have to pay higher prices.
It is a tax. On Americans.
Tariffs are responsible for about .5% of the current 3.4% inflation rate — which would be a bigger deal if that weren’t swamped by the effect of the increase in oil prices due to Trump’s idiotic war with Iran.
Yale University’s Budget Lab estimates that tariffs are costing each American household about $1,100 a year.
Trump’s tariff imbecility has led to what even the Wall Street Journal editorial board calls the “The Dumbest Trade War in History.” That’s because tariffs – especially tariffs levied nonsensically, variably, and inconsistently – don’t work. They are also illegal.
The closest that I’ve seen mainstream media come to calling Trump stupid about tariffs came in 2019, in an Associated Press article headlined “Trump’s defense of tariffs based on dubious claims.” It said, in part:
He’s been contradicted by one of his top advisers, dinged in regular fact checks and called out by top economists. Still, President Donald Trump has held firm to dubious declarations about trade policy, raising questions among experts and even his allies about whether he either can’t – or won’t – grasp the fundamentals of the issue.
That’s one story seven years ago in one outlet. By contrast, every single news story about tariffs should include the essential background that Trump misunderstands how tariffs work, and that there does not appear to be any intelligent rationale for how he applies them.
I’ve written before about how horribly naïve – OK, stupid – almost all of the legacy press coverage has been on this topic.
- March 12, 2025: “Press coverage of Trump’s tariffs understates the insanity”
- April 3, 2025: “Mainstream media falls for Trump’s insane ‘reciprocal’ tariff talk”
- February 20, 2026: “The news media chose not to tell you the truth about tariffs”
- July 4, 2026: “8 things you need to know (and didn’t read) about Trump’s new tariffs”
That War
I wrote in Part One that turning the Arc de Trump into a sniper’s nest and ammo dump is the second-most idiotic idea Trump has ever had, because first place is reserved for his war against Iran.
I’ve written a lot about Trump’s foolhardy decision to go to war, his inexplicable thinking about how to wage it, and how stupid he was to think it would be easy.
The best current illustration of this is how he talks about the Strait of Hormuz. On March 9, the second week of the war, over six months ago now, Trump said this:
In the meantime, during this brief disruption, the United States is offering political risk insurance to any tankers operating in the Gulf. So, we’re putting up risk insurance. We’ll perhaps go alongside of them for protection. We don’t think it’ll be necessary, if it is. And if they do anything, the price will be incalculable. It will be so great that they will have wished they never did it. Because you have to keep the straits flowing. With all of that, it affects other countries, much more than it does the United States. It doesn’t really affect us. We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need.
It wasn’t brief. Tankers did need protection, but he didn’t provide any. His empty threats (thank goodness) to do incalculable damage to Iran have become a sick joke. He failed to keep the Strait flowing (which it was doing just fine before the war). And yeah, it did affect us. Just a bit.
Trump has also repeatedly announced that the Strait of Hormuz is open, when it is in fact closed. Sometimes he says it’s both. In the Oval Office on May 21 he said “We have total control of the Strait of Hormuz” (which we did not) then just over a minute later said “We want it open, we want it free.”
Here is a September 2 post on Truth Social:
Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be “hotter” than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Idiotic.
And what kind of idiot doesn’t anticipate that Iran, if attacked, would respond by shutting down the Strait and launching strikes against its neighbors?
That would be Trump, who even after the fact, on March 16, insisted that it had been unthinkable.
“Nobody. Nobody. No, no, no, no,” Trump said. “The greatest experts – nobody thought they were going to hit – they were, I wouldn’t say friendly countries, they were like neutral.”
He then added: “There was no expert that would say that was going to happen. It’s not a question of like, ‘Gee, should you have known?’”
Trump was explicitly warned in pre-war intelligence estimates that Iran might close the Strait and launch missile attacks. And it was a commonly-held view among Iran experts – in part because Iranian officials had openly threatened as much.
To Know Him Is to Know an Idiot
People who have worked with Trump – at least the ones who aren’t stupid – know he’s an idiot.
Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson famously referred to him as a “moron” after a Pentagon meeting in 2017.
Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster was said to have called him an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner.”
Back in 2018, officials told NBC News that then-White House chief of staff John Kelly was telling staffers that Trump “has a questionable grasp on policy issues and the functions of government” and had referred to Trump as “an idiot” multiple times to underscore his point.
Three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Alex Isenstadt, Kenneth P. Vogel and Josh Dawsey wrote an article in Politico headlined “Trump vexed by challenges, scale of government”, in which “nearly two dozen” anonymous sources described Trump as an angry control freak in way over his head.
“Trump often asks simple questions about policies, proposals and personnel,” they wrote. “And, when discussions get bogged down in details, the president has been known to quickly change the subject – to ‘seem in control at all times,’ one senior government official said.”
But the media’s acknowledgement of Trump’s idiocy, such as it was, came early in his first administration. I guess it’s not news anymore.
Such a Genius
Trump’s insistence that he is a genius is so desperate it’s kind of hilarious. His evidence is sorely lacking.
He frequently cites the results of a dementia test that for some reason his doctors have given him three times. (He said on May 4 that he takes one every time someone calls him a “moron”.)
“I took it and I aced it,” he said on May 22. He said that “toward the end, like they had a question like, pick a number, sir, any number. OK. 203. Multiply times nine, divided by two, add on 1324, subtract 1292. Sir, multiply it out one more time by 19. What is the answer, sir? And I got it right. You know?”
That’s obviously total fiction. (Here’s a sample test.) He also claimed that “the one doctor said, ‘I’ve been doing this test for 20 years, I’ve never seen anybody ace it.’” Ha.
Trump’s new favorite story about how smart he is, which he told most recently on September 16, at a political rally in North Carolina, goes like this:
I wanted to get a bonus for the military. So it came out to my desk, “Sir, we can give $1,775.” I looked at the number and I said, “Wait a minute, for $1 more, you’re 1,776.” Which is pretty good. I was, I was quite impressed with my intelligence. I’m a high IQ person after all.
Not. Persuasive.
We Know Already!
The best and worst argument journalists have for not calling Trump stupid is that most people know that already. They don’t need to say so because the readers and viewers have figured it out for themselves. I say it’s an essential element of his presidency, and they’re covering it up.
As for what people know, the polls are mixed.
A Pew Research poll in May 2026 found that the share who describe Trump as “mentally sharp” had gone down since last August – but only from 48% to 44%, which I think is still way too high.
A YouGov poll two months ago asking how much the word “intelligent” applies to Trump found 42% saying “not at all”. But 37% said “a lot” and 21% said “a little.” The “a lot” contingent was down eight points since 2024, so that’s progress, but it’s still awfully high.
Pollsters sometimes ask respondents what one word they would use to describe Trump. Most of them don’t offer “stupid” as an option. A recent Economist/YouGov poll, for instance, didn’t include it – although “corrupt”, “dangerous”, “out-of-touch”, “cruel”, and “racist” accounted for five of the top six spots.
A September 2015 Suffolk University/USA Today poll did offer “Idiot/Jerk/Stupid/Dumb” as one option, and it came in first, at nearly 10%, followed by “Arrogant”, “Crazy/Nuts”, and “Buffoon/Clown/Comical/Joke”.
The only truly open-ended question of that kind that I found was a Quinnipiac University poll from December 2017. Asked “what is the first word that comes to mind when you think of President Trump,” the response was pretty dramatic.
“Liar” and “incompetent” took second and third place, respectively.
But the number one answer was “idiot”.