Trump 24: Who’s The Dumbass in the Room? (August 31, 2024)

Trump has mind numbingly bored us for nearly a decade about how smart he is. Smarter than the Generals, Economists, Scientists, Rocket Engineers, Military Officers, Diplomats, Teachers, Writers, Academics, and Trade Experts. Come to think of it… really Everyone. Beyond the fact that this demonstrates a fixed clinically relevant form of mental disturbance, the problem with this narrative is that there is precisely zero objective evidence to support the claim. There isn’t even a plausible Kellyanne type “Alternative Facts” explanation.

You can add the commonsense observation that the Smartest Person in the Room virtually never shouts it out loud for everyone to hear.

In Trump’s case, a rather classic example of the Napoleonic Short Man’s Syndrome routinely impels him to demean others (especially professional women) as stupid, dumb and crazy. His IQ Freudian id is really triggered. Finding himself cross-footed with the new energy of the Harris-Walz Campaign since July, and the uniquely unpatriotic decision by Joe Biden to pass the torch and step down from the 2024 election a month ago, Trump has struggled to activate his nasty name calling superpower.

Alas, the crackling days of Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb, Bird Brain Nikki, and Crazy Hillary are gone and the public doesn’t find this contemptuous schtick funny anymore. But Trump with the limited set of verbal tools at his command is trying to rev it up one more time by declaring Harris and Walz just stupid, very stupid, and dumb. A hot zinger if there ever was one.

Americans can and do expect better behavior from someone interviewing for the top job in our country. Trump is the one endlessly trying to abolish the prior standard of dignity and minimal decency in top level campaign rhetoric.

Of course, there have always been subordinates, underlings, and surrogates who breech the norms and make scurrilous accusations, but that was mainly done in hushed tones, in the dark, in back rooms, and with whispers and dog whistles in the past.

But Trump, Master of All Things, believes he is better at this than Anyone Ever, so he fronts the blatant attacks on his opponents with racist, sexist, and crude sexual allusions. As for example, this week he has added oral sex to his worn-out bag of tricks with a two-for referring to Harris and Hillary Clinton.

This gutter trash talk may be titteringly amusing to a bunch of adolescent lads laboring in their gaming chairs, but the rest of America’s voters just find it crude, disgusting, and depressing. More to the point here, schoolyard name calling is not actual evidence that others lack intelligence or mental capacity. It’s just a hot air blather and time waster.

Human intelligence is a complex mixture of traits and behaviors, some inherited and some environmentally determined, but most honest observers would agree in 2024 that higher education, including years of college and graduate school study with earned advanced degrees is a pretty darn good surrogate measure of a person’s intelligence and mental acuity.

Much more likely to be on point than high-volume, endlessly repeated blasts from a microphone.

A simple comparison of the 2024 National Tickets for the Republicans and Democrats and their Life Partners with respect to their higher education earned credentials is easy to assemble. The data are factually objective, and were accumulated decades before any of the parties was running for national political office, so they are less subject to bias in interpretation.

The comparison is made on a level playing field for each of these individuals and is a measure of intelligence in action over a lifetime (four to eight decades in length) for each member of the 2024 Electoral Group of 8.

It doesn’t hurt that the comparison only requires simple math and logic, accessible to the average 10-year old American youngster, as well as their elders.

Below is a summary chart for the 2024 competing teams for President and Vice-President and partners. For the Democrats: Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff (her partner); Time Walz and Gwen Walz (his partner); Donald Trump and Melania Trump (his partner); and JD Vance and Usha Vance (his partner).

Name	College	Degree	Field	Year
Blue Team	Presidential Partners
Kamala Harris	Howard University	B.A.	Political Sci/Economics	1986
	Hastings College of Law	J.D.	Law Degree	1989
Doug Emhoff	California State U	B.A.	Communications Studies	1987
	USC Gould Law School	J.D.	Law Degree	1990

Tim Walz	Chadron State College	B.S.	Social Science ED	1989
	Minnesota State Univ	M.S	Educational Leadership	2001
Gwen Walz	Gustavus Adolphus	B.A.	Education	1988
	Minnesota State Univ	M.A.


Red Team	Presidential Partners
Donald Trump	U Pennsylvania Wharton	B.S.	Economics	1968
Melania Trump	U Ljubljana (Slovenia)	None	Didn’t Finish

JD Vance	Ohio State University	B.A.	Political Sci/Philosophy	2009
	Yale Law School	J.D.	Law Degree	2013
Usha Vance	Yale University	B.A.	History	2008
	Cambridge U (England)	M.Phil.	Early Modern History	2010
	Yale Law School	J.D.	Law Degree	2013

Upon inspection, certain things are clear. Of the four actual candidates for our nation’s two highest offices, Donald Trump is dead last in degrees earned and years spent in study. Among the four couples, Donald Trump and his wife also come in last with the least.

Considering just the Republican 4-person team, both JD and Usha have five times the number of earned degrees than Trump & Spouse (or a 2.5 to 1 ratio per person). In terms of years of education to obtain those earned degrees the Vances’ outperform the Trumps by three times (15 years to 5).

Both JD and Usha have graduate law degrees; Trump’s unit has none in any field. In fact, among the Republican Group of 4, Usha Vance is far and away the most highly educated, with three degrees, including a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University in England and a double Yale Ivy pedigree for both College and Law School. Furthermore, she has not one but three post-graduate Federal Judicial Clerkships, including years with both Kavanaugh on the DC Circuit Appeals Court, and directly for John Roberts at the Supreme Court. That’s impressive.

Trump’s empty claims are simply dim-bulbed by the educational accomplishments of the wife of his Vice-Presidential selection. It is indeed ironic that just this week JD Vance was found to say on tape in an old interview (2021) that professional women who don’t prioritize children over career are on a “path to misery”.

From Raw Story (August 31, 2024):

“According to the report, Vance claimed women who choose careers over having children are headed down a “path to misery.”

In particular he pointed to some of his female classmates at Yale Law School, and said of them that they were, “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.

The report notes that 39 minutes into the podcast, the Ohio Republican stated, “What they don’t realize – and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God – is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.”

“The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,” he added. “And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society.””

In his now typically ham-handed fashion, verbally unworthy of the holder of an advanced degree from one of the nation’s finest law schools, lawyer communicator JD has managed to insult the universe of women professionals, all female lawyers, his classmates at Yale Law School, his own wife, and the vast majority of educated humans in the US in one bumbling stroke.

I can’t fathom what this newly displayed verbal bust will cost JD at home, but it is inconceivable that his wife thinks her nine years of higher education. three degrees from prestigious universities, and 3 years of Federal Judicial Clerkships should ideally be reduced to the status of seed bearer of three children for a Great Man. Ridiculous.

Usha has tried valiantly a couple times recently to extricate JD from his massive oral flops, and she may go on TV soon to try and clean this one up as well. More power to her if she wants to try. But JD Vance is becoming more than an ankle weight to Trump’s Election 24 chances; he is becoming a veritable 2-ton lead block and chain tied to Trump’s waist.

And to think, a now obvious better choice than fake-hillbilly Vance was sitting in the chair right next to him all along. A powerful symbol for Women and South Asians, voter groups Trump needs to persuade in order to win. Or he could as well have chosen Nikki Haley who offers the same advantages, plus the benefit of elective office success (Governor of South Carolina) and foreign policy credentials from her two years as UN Ambassador appointed by Trump himself back before his original mental faculties began to noticeably fade, sometime after 2020’s election loss.

Of course, Trump would have to forgive Haley for her impolitic prediction from January 2024 about the old age disqualification conundrum, but she has proven flexible in the past and now endorses him.

From the Independent (July 22, 2024):

Nikki Haley declared that the first US political party to retire its “80-year-old candidate” will win the election, resurfaced footage shows.

The clip has been re-shared online following 81-year-old Joe Biden’s announcement that he will no longer be standing for re-election.

In a statement on Sunday, 21 July, the president said he would endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him at the top of the party ticket.

“Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump,” Ms. Haley said in January 2024.

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.”

That shouldn’t be too much of a leap for Trump, as after all, he has already forgiven JD Vance for his own far worse assessment of Trump in 2016 while he was riding high from his Hillbilly Elegy book sales, and luxuriating in media splendor for a 32-year old newbie only three years out of graduate school, bold enough to already pen an autobiography. Remember Trump was almost at the advanced age of 41 before he was ready to hazard the autobiography plunge back in 1987.

What a set of brass balls on that young Hillbilly Gone to Yale!

To remind the reader of JD Vance’s balls to the wall hyper confidence in his own wisdom and opinion, we have from Politico (July 15, 2024):

“I’m a Never Trump guy.”

“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, while publicizing his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” “I never liked him.”

“As somebody who doesn’t like Trump, myself, I sort of — I understand where Trump’s voters come from,” Vance later said in the Rose interview. “But I also don’t like Trump himself, and that made me realize that maybe I’m not quite part of either world totally.”

During Vance’s Senate Republican primary in 2021, the interview clip was used regularly in ads from Club for Growth Action and USA Freedom Fund, who were backing another Republican candidate and aimed to show discord between Vance and Trump.

“My god, what an idiot.”

Also included in the ads from Club for Growth Action and USA Freedom Fund were some of Vance’s since-deleted tweets criticizing the former president.

“My god what an idiot,” Vance wrote in one of the tweets. It was one of many tweets now deleted.

“America’s Hitler”

Vance once questioned whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message in 2016 to one of his former roommates.

It was that or a “cynical asshole like Nixon,” Vance wrote in messages to former Yale Law School classmate Josh McLaurin, now a Democratic state senator in Georgia.

“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”

Vance, who first became popular as an author, once wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled “Why Trump’s Antiwar Message Resonates with White America.” He didn’t hold back his disapproval for the former president then while also describing his own belief as to why people in the communities he grew up in supported Trump.

“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office,” he wrote in the op-ed, describing his own families’ adoration and commitment to Trump.

“I can’t stomach Trump.”

And while Vance will join Trump as his running mate this fall, in 2016, Vance said he didn’t plan on voting for Trump — instead opting for a third-party candidate.

In a now-deleted tweet weeks before the election, Vance wrote that he would be voting for third-party candidate Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer who ran as an independent.

“I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance said in an interview with NPR, when describing why he would vote for a third-party candidate. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

He even considered voting for Hillary Clinton over Trump: “I think there’s a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton.”

With a full-throated endorsement like that on multiple occasions, it is easy to see why Trump went for JD in 2024. Is Grandpop’s fly zipped up all the way? Somebody better check.

Reading this again, I just have to say this seems like a large mouthful of criticism for Trump to swallow, but he seems to have accommodated to it. In fact, he rewarded JD with his first major decision as a Prospective President to Be in 2024 by choosing him for Vice-President over the women and the six Republican munchkins who started out to challenge him.

This whole interlude strongly brings to mind the classic Lawyer cross-examination question to pose to a witness who has made contradictory statements: Are you lying now, or were you lying then? Of course, this is a fatal trap, since the answer is a loser either way. But it does illuminate the full extent of hypocrisy in service to political expedience. Which Trump exhibits not only in Spades, but while holding a Royal Flush.

Since Trump has admitted himself several times in public and on tape, like the Arlington National Cemetery Incident fresh this past week, that Trump just doesn’t make any mistakes, maybe it was a careless staffer who forget to tell the Boss about JD’s cocky impressions in 2016 during the extensive vetting process conducted by Trump’s Transition Team. (Oh wait, they weren’t active til after the Convention when he could add Eric and Donnie Jr. to the quality personnel mix.)

Or maybe it was A Democratic conspiracy between President Biden and the Justice Department to set Trump up.

Or on a bad day, maybe it was the Venezuelan Jewish Space Lasers from the Sky which reprogrammed somebody’s computer in the basement of that Pizza Shop in DC with the Demonic Child Predators who conspired to try and make Trump look bad.

While all of this is fun and giggles, it is relevant to the current enquiry because it calls into question the quality and extent of Trump’s current active intelligence and mental function under stress.

To return to the main subject of this comparison, let us now turn to the Democratic side of the ledger. All four members of Election Team Blue 2024 have double degrees, at least at the Masters level beyond college. The Presidential half of the ticket members both hold law degrees at the Doctoral level. This gives them an overall advantage compared to Trump & Spouse of 4 to1 in earned higher education degrees. In terms of years spent studying for these honors and educational credentials, the ratio is almost 3 to 1 (14 years to 5).

If you compare the entire Democratic Team to the Republican Team the difference are less striking, with the Democrats having more earned degrees in total (8 vs 6), an advantage of only 33%. In terms of total years of higher academic study, the totals are Democrats (24-26 years) versus the Republicans (19 years for all 4 class members).

As is perhaps to be expected by now, Trump trails the pack (7^th place out of 8) for lifetime years of study and academic achievement with earned academic degrees.

To be completely fair, it is possible the usual items of comparison could be further refined if the was other evidence of Trump’s educational superiority. There is not. In terms of quality, Trump attended a disciplinary Military Academy for high school with no honors or academic distinction. When he applied for college in 1964, the only place he could get into was Fordham, then a small and not highly ranked private Jesuit college in Manhattan. He was able to transfer after 2 years to the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School to complete his Bachelors undergraduate degree in Economics in 1968. Penn is considered one of the original Ivy League Schools, but in the mid-1960’s was considered to be in the bottom half of those institutions in selectivity for undergraduate study. The graduate program in Business at Wharton School of Finance was considered top tier then, but Trump was not admitted for graduate study there, or anywhere else, and did not earn or study for any advanced degree.

There is also an asterisk to be noted about his transfer to Penn after two years. His own elder sister, recently deceased retired Federal Judge Maryanne Trump said on tape to her niece Mary Trump that Donald was such a poor student when he applied to college that he paid a bright kid to take his SAT admissions test for him (something that sadly happened fairly easily in the mid 1960’s).

Trump’s nephew Fred Trump III in his recently published memoir (2024), also reveals that Trump’s older brother Fred Jr. asked a fellow fraternity member from his college days who was an admissions officer at Penn in 1966 to help his younger brother Donald to transfer. The cherry on this particular cake Fred Trump III writes about is that Trump’s father, millionaire Fred Sr., physically accompanied Donald to the interview and talked up the possibility of a large cash donation if his son were to be accepted. This Daddy Favor was something Trump Sr. had already done for the Prep School on Long Island that both of Trump’s brothers, Fred Jr. and Robert attended. The funds for the school’s Soccer Field were provided by Trump and named in his honor. A little bit of financial palm greasing can go a long way, school admissions wise. Whether Fred Trump Sr. ever actually donated money to Penn is unknown.

This is not proof positive that Trump’s transfer to Penn was not earned solely by his academic performance and intelligence, but it doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

What we can say from Trump’s documented college record is that he demonstrated no particular academic prowess. He never made the Dean’s list at either Fordham or Penn. He graduated without any type of honors degree in 1968, according the commencement bulletin. There is nothing to be ashamed of here, but he was a middling student at best, with a single undergraduate degree without distinction from a decent school. That would be good enough for almost anybody.

For Trump, the Truth is never enough. He must try and promote himself into the exceptional education category, a category which he most certainly does not merit. As shown above, he is absolutely the least educated of the four national nominees in 2024.

This is not some quirk due to comparison selectivity. Trump loses out compared to Joe Biden as well, who has two earned degrees, including a Doctoral level law degree. Joe Biden’s wife eclipses them both with three earned degrees of her own, including a Doctorate in Education.

Funny how all the women here are multi-degreed and equally or more accomplished in educational achievement than their male partners, except for Trump. To Trump, this might be astounding; to everyone else, it isn’t so surprising in the first quarter of the 21^st century. The four other women described here (save for Trump’s wife) each have two or three earned degrees.

But Trump trails not just these Women in Question, but also every male President in the last 30 years to boot. Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama all have two degrees, two of them as Doctoral level lawyers. Even George Bush 43 (God Bless him) had two high quality Ivy League legitimately earned degrees from Yale (BA) and Harvard (MBA).

And while you’re at it, you can also add Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush to the list. Each of these accomplished women has two earned degrees, twice as many as Trump, and more years of educational study as well.

Trump viscerally hates to bring up the rear. Especially behind a veritable parade of professional women, each of whom can talk and chew gum at the same time, while composing complete sentences for conversation or in writing. But Facts is Facts.

It is a fair bet that some of Trump’s uncontrollable vitriol towards women is Envy masked as Rage. Not too healthy a mental state for him to suffer, really. Especially when the rest of the country has to deal with the blowback from his personal deficiencies in this regard. Also not a very smart idea politically to repeatedly verbally assault and denigrate women who now routinely cast 53% of all the votes in Presidential elections.

There are some other circumstances which might modify the results of this comparison of intelligence measured by educational achievement more towards Trump’s favor. He might have been so bright he skipped grades in school and graduated from college or graduate school at a very young age like 14 or 15. He did not. He might have taken and passed Advanced Placement Subject exams during high school that earned him college course credits and entry to college as a sophomore student. He did not.

He might have invented a valuable product or process and patented it. He never did. He might have been a musical prodigy and composer. He was not. He might have won an International Spelling Bee. He did not. He might have won a curated major Science Fair, or International Math Competition. He never did.

Oops. Well, so much for that.

There is one last item that could save Trump’s self-told tale of intellectual brilliance. Through the mid 1970’s, the Princeton Educational Testing Service SAT (Math and Verbal Tests) which were required to gain admission to colleges were specifically designed to correlate with the taker’s IQ as measured on standard psychological intelligence testing.

We know Trump took the SAT test (or at least he has a reported score) to gain entrance to Fordham in 1964. To bolster his uncorroborated case, he could simple release his actual scores. Or even tell us what his PSAT (a pre-test SAT that most college students took) was. He never has.

I remember when Trump offered a $5 million charity donation if Obama would release his academic records in 2012 along with citizenship records, even after his Obama Birtherism fantasy was blown up in 2011 when the White House released Obama’s long form official birth certificate from Hawaii in 1961.

So, Trump thinks that academic records are valuable (at least $5 million worth in a contested political context). I don’t have $5 million dollars to challenge Trump. But I call him out. Don’t be an Intellectual Chicken and hide your SAT brilliance under a basket. Shine a light for all Americans. Disprove the accusation and suspicion that you are, and have always been, an educational lightweight.

From a recent peer-reviewed published paper in the Journal of Intelligence (2019):

“Fifteen years ago, Frey and Detterman established that the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence (Frey and Detterman, 2004; Koenig, Frey, and Detterman, 2008)…

In two studies, we found that SAT scores correlated up to 0.8 with measures of fluid reasoning ability and g, and as highly with traditional intelligence test scores as scores on those tests did with each other. Frey and Detterman established that the SAT (and, with Koenig, the ACT) was g-loaded, could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence, and could be converted to an IQ scale with a simple equation [1,2]…

Frey and Detterman [1] has been cited 286 times, according to the Social Sciences Citation Index, and 651 times by Google Scholar as of the writing of this paper…

Although the principal finding of Frey and Detterman has been established for 15 years, it bears repeating: the SAT is a good measure of intelligence [1]…

Colleges, even nonselective ones, need to identify those individuals whose success is most likely, because that guarantees institutions a consistent revenue stream and increases retention rates, seen by some as an important measure of institutional quality. Selective and highly selective colleges further need to identify the most talented students because those students (or, rather, their average SAT scores) are important for the prestige of the university. Indeed, the correlation between average SAT/ACT scores and college ranking in U.S. News & World Report is very nearly 0.9 [10,11]…

Here, it is worth recalling the reason the SAT was used in admissions decisions in the first place: to allow scholarship candidates to apply for admission to Harvard without attending an elite preparatory school [7]. Without an objective measure of ability, admissions officers are left with assessing not just the performance of the student in secondary education, but also the quality of the opportunities afforded to that student, which vary considerably across the secondary school landscape in the United States.

We also know that the SAT is useful in predicting life outcomes long after college, even in the most restricted samples. For example, researchers have found that SAT scores in intellectually precocious children at age 13 predicted achievements more than two decades later [24,25]…”

I am a near contemporary of Trump (b. 1949), who applied to college from high school in New York City (1966-67 senior year) after I took the PSAT (Spring 1966) and SAT (Fall 1966). Paragraph 6 quoted immediately above speaks directly to my own educational circumstances. I felt the anxiety and pressure to get good test scores, happiness and relief when the test results were revealed, and joy at the college admissions process outcome for me. At nearly sixty years distance, I can still recall my exact scores. No doubt, so could Trump (before the fogginess seeps in).

At this remove, if I had to guess, I would suggest Trump’s SAT Score was most likely in the 950-1100 range. This would make his standard IQ estimate somewhere between 106 to 115. This score is quite respectable, and would be around the 80^th percentile for all Americans. Sadly for Trump, merely being somewhat above average is not acceptable to his inflated sense of self-worth A veritable Legend in His Own Mind.

Trump could provide some reasonable evidence of his native intelligence if he would follow his own advice challenge to Obama and just publish his own SAT scores. Absent that corroborating information about the best we can do is judge Trump against others in the Political Realm on an Education Comparison basis such as that given above.

The likelihood he will release his actual SAT scores is quite slim. We know this because, among other admirable legal tactics Trump tasked Michael Cohen to perform was to yell and threaten lawsuits and severe litigation damages against Trump’s high school, and both Fordham and University of Pennsylvania, if any academic records were to be released. One can only wonder what educational and intellectual achievement delights these records might conceal. I would be happy for the country if the facts proved me wrong about Trump’s SAT performance.

In the end, one is left with the firm conclusion that Trump’s intelligence (as reflected in his lifetime educational performance) solidly brings up the rear for those elected as President in America for at least the past 30 years. He is the least educated, and most inaccurately boastful of any President in living memory. Every other person and their spouses on the national ballot in 2024 have a better educational record than Trump without exception, except for his wife.

Americans should expect better from their Presidents as we are now nearly 25 years into the 21sr Century. There is no need to go back and lower our standards and expectations this year. Trump’s shouted Intelligence Megaphone is running low on the Electrics.

So, it is both inaccurate and shameful for Trump to launch constant Stupid Name Bombs at political opponents who outclass him, instead of talking about real problems and real solutions for America. Prospective National Leaders having a better education is a positive thing and worthwhile for America’s long-term safety and prosperity in a complex world going forward. Even Republicans ought to agree on this minimal standard in a partisan contest.

Trump has bully-boyed his way through most of his life. 2024 is Past Time for him to put up or shut up about his brain size and current mental function. We are tired of silly made up stories about His Mental Greatness. I say Rubbish.

Anyway, to answer the leading question posed at the top: Who’s the Dumbass in the Room running for president in 2024, the best multiple-choice answer is Trump, the One and Only.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Walz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwen_Walz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Emhoff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JD_Vance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usha_Vance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Bush

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Biden

https://www.rawstory.com/jd-vance-2669109060/

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/joe-biden-drops-out-nikki-haley-b2583808.html