Nope! He has above average luck, if had above average intelligence he would be cruising to reelection and he could have built on his base without tacking that much to the center. I don't know where you see him having above average intelligence?
He is very cunning and I do not think he is innately stupid. He is a master manipulator and understands human psychology very well. I also think that at this point there is little difference between Trump "the showman" and who Trump really is when it comes to his position on issues...... however he clearly understands the risks of COVID19, North Korea and many other things, he simply does not care because he has his own agenda, which appears to be entirely driven by what he wants and how he wants it.
I have to disagree nobody who is very cunning would have driven a wedge between us and them so quickly after becoming president, there was no way he could maintain the voters he had and the fringe Trump voter. There is no way a cunning person would have sat down and said the things he did to Woodward. I name 10 other things a cunning person would have done better in the last year alone, especially his handling of Corona, a cunning person would have used the rona to rally the country and road a wave of patriotism to reelection. No cunning person would have done the church walk and held up that bible like he did. I just don't see anything he has done cunning except for tapping into the latent bigotry of this country to get elected.
I'm not sure it's cunning but I think of it more as a very range of intelligence and no intellectual curiosity. For all of Trump's failures he has been able to keep his name relevant for decades. That does show an understanding of the media and marketing. While I think luck played a large role in his election he clearly understood how the electorate he was appealing too to defeat so many more experienced and arguably more intelligent opponents.
He might be a master manipulator but I really wonder if he can carry on an educated conversation about anything other than the art of manipulating people for money. He's a smooth talking salesman, I'll give him that. My bet is he doesn't know much of anything else, except for what he hears on tv. I really doubt he reads any journals or scientific or literary articles, or even books. I actually wonder if he can even comprehend some of the words.
Wait wait wait wait wait............it is already very well established that the man reads nothing. Nothing. They have to boil down his briefings to a single page and the only way to get him to even read that is to prominently mention his name throughout. Just saying. The non-read thing is a given. When Trump was running in 2016 and supporters were saying, "He's just like us!", I thought, "You, too, have personally overseen billion-dollar bankruptcies?" But it's true. It's okay to be racist (hating that portion of the Democratic base) and it's okay to not read anything, ever (hating much of the rest). OWN THE LIBS! MAGA! KAG!
Yeah, I've read a few stories from people who worked with him on how he doesn't read. He hires people to read for him, probably like how his daddy hired people to take college tests for him.
The more people talk about these stupid statements ("trees", "raking the forest floor", "it'll get cooler"), the less they talk about his comments about coronavirus to Woodward or U.S. military veterans to current U.S. military.
It's obvious he has little to no intellectual curiosity and has no value for knowledge other than immediate benefit to him. I read some of "Art of the Deal" and it starts out with a description of a typical day for him and it is sad how banal it is and how so much of his time is dedicated to just how he can get ahead. That doesn't mean he is stupid. Intelligence isn't always equally distributed and most people are capable in only a few areas and really only want to be good in a few areas. I think Trump is an extreme case. His intelligence is very focused on marketing and branding and that is matched by a very strong drive to personal self-aggrandizing.
Trump just claimed to have read Bob Woodward’s Rage, and said “I actually got to read it last night. I read it very quickly and it was very boring." The problem is that Rage comes in at 466 pages. According to Amazon Kindle, it would take 10 hours and 18 minutes to read. LOL, he would lie about anything. Typical example of him lying about reading. It goes to show he's always been a liar. Its what he does best. He was doing it 30 years ago. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/trump-claims-read-bob-woodward-book-rage-one-night.html
