Part of being a really smart person is knowing when other people (like Jared Kushner) are stupid
What evidence do we have that Donald Trump is smart? Just these four things, which he’s mentioned over and over and over and over again:
1) He went to the Wharton School of Business (thanks to family connections).
2) He has a lot of money (again, thanks to family connections — and like a stupid person might, he’s underperformed the real estate market by at least $13 billion over the past 40 years).
4) He says he’s smart — All. The. Fucking. Time.*
And what evidence do we have that Donald Trump is not intelligent?
Literally everything else he’s ever said.
And now you can add this to the pile:
He thought making Jared Kushner a top White House adviser and putting him in charge of Middle East peace, solving the opioid crisis, and reinventing the federal government was a good idea.
That’s stupid.
A smart president would have spent no more than 10 minutes with Kush before putting him in charge of figuring out how this drinking bird works:
Yes, one hallmark of a bright mind is the ability to discern when other people are dumb. When you’re truly smart, it’s not that tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. You can generally tell who’s intelligent and who isn’t by spending a few quality minutes with them. If they loudly scream untrue things at you, for instance, they’re not terribly smart.
However, when it comes to Kushner there’s a lot more evidence to draw from than just the stupid, vacuous look on his face.
Two recent Vanity Fair articles remind us just how stupid Trump was for trusting in his callow son-in-law.
The first, “Jared Kushner’s Family Is Screwed, and It’s all Boy Wonder’s Fault,” notes that Kushner’s career is marked almost entirely by one colossal, high-profile failure: his purchase of 666 5th Avenue for $1.8 billion just prior to the Great Recession. The deal has turned out to be such an albatross that Kushner’s partner in the venture has mused that the property “would be worth a lot more if it was just dirt.”
The second, an inside look at the current White House chaos, reveals that Trump is now privately blaming Kushner for the mess he’s is in:
Speaking to Steve Bannon on Tuesday, Trump blamed Jared Kushner for his role in decisions, specifically the firings of Mike Flynn and James Comey, that led to Mueller’s appointment, according to a source briefed on the call.
Here’s a serious question for you, Mr. President. Who the fuck outside of your “brain” trust thought firing Comey was a good idea? To quote Jamie Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda, “Was that smart, was it shrewd, was it good tactics, or was it stupid?”
In fact, Kushner’s incompetence is so self-evident, it prompted former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg to tell Vanity Fair, “Jared is the worst political adviser in the White House in modern history. I’m only saying publicly what everyone says behind the scenes at Fox News, in conservative media, and the Senate and Congress.”
So, yeah, Trump — who repeatedly promised he’d hire only the best people — is surrounded not only by amateurs, but amateurs who are incapable of using common sense or learning basic facts about the world.
Not only is the current administration the most corrupt in modern history, it’s also a bona fide idiocracy in which the dregs ineluctably gravitate to the top.
Let’s just hope Bob Mueller saves our republic before it’s too late. In the meantime, we’re fucked.
*This is actually a good reason for thinking he’s an idiot. Have you ever met an intelligent person who talks nonstop about how smart he is? Did Oscar Wilde tell people he had all the best words? Did Niels Bohr scream at fellow particle physicists about how he had all the best quantum equations?
