If there was a game show like are you smarter than a fifth grader, but instead it is are you smarter than previous President George Bush Jr. and twice impeached previous President Trump is the first contestant would Trump win? So basically who is smarter the 43rd or 45th?
With people in power it’s always hard to say whether a bad thing they do is due to stupidity or ill-intent, tho I tend to favor the second hypothesis.
All of their actions did benefit a group. For Trump, most obviously, himself; but he also advanced the power of the American far-right and probably some companies thanks to lose regulations. For Bush, he clearly aimed to give more power to companies over things formerly done by the state, like hurricane relief or even the military. His vice president Dick Cheney famously profited from the Iraq war through the company Halliburton.
Many of Bush’s policies had a disastrous human cost, but they were very efficient at filling the pockets of a few shareholders. So was he an incompetent buffoon playing into the hands of the capitalists, or was he himself an evil schemer who willingly enriched those he deemed worthy allies at the expense of the rest of the world?
Same question applies to Trump. A narrative people like is that of the out of control puppet. An idiot that the Republican Party tried to use because he was attractive to their target demographic, but who ended up turning against his puppeteers and giving full reign to his folly.
But it’s also possible that he is a smart and evil man who’s particularly talented at playing the role of a madman and who saw it was working.
So basically, I have no definite knowledge of the intelligence of either man.
I tend to favour Hanlon’s Razor. It makes much more sense that this dumbass old rich guy stumbled his way into the whitehouse by saying just the right combination of old rich guy nonsense that got American conservatives excited. Tons of powerful people took advantage of him for tons of different reasons. It’s why he was never consistent on anything. He’d be pro- something and then meet with someone in a backroom and suddenly be anti- that thing. His cabinet was full of Dick Cheneys.
If you look at Trump through the lens of “dumb spoiled rich guy who didn’t really want the job anymore as soon as he realized how much work it actually was”, everything he does makes perfect sense. He was a useful idiot for the wealthy elites to do their regulatory capture. Basically Reagan all over again. They even used the same campaign slogan.
I had to google Hanlon’s razor. For Trump I’ll go with a combo of malice (revenge) and stupidity. For the rest it’s greed and narcissism. From wiki- Douglas W. Hubbard quoted Hanlon’s razor and added “a clumsier but more accurate corollary …: ‘Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system.’”
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I don’t find that this adage applies that well in politics. Yeah, I’ll assume whoever almost hit me with his car the other day was stupid/irresponsible/distracted rather than that they were attempting to murder me. Or that someone who gave me wrong directions to somewhere was mistaken rather than deceitful. That is because stupidity can explain these things, but stupidity on its own doesn’t explain becoming president.
Beside, if you assume he was being used by dickcheneys, you’re still assuming malice, just not from the same person.
As for which case his behavior would make most sense in, I won’t try to contradict you since I’m not good at analysing people and don’t enjoy trying.
I just tend to think of Trump+close collaborators as a system and assume the purpose of a system is what it does, and I don’t make too many assumptions of Trump’s exact place in this.