Subject: Re: AOC’s thoughts on Taiwan
It may be smart to have loyal people around you, but it's also rather obvious. It's not an indication of intelligence.

Really? It may seem obvious...but Trump appears to be the first person to have figured out that controlling the federal bureaucracy doesn't have to be like turning a battleship. This major obstacle that's hindered so many other President's from deftly implementing their agenda, running across the inertia of the federal government - and Trump found the way around it. Just make sure you pick people who are 100% committed to your agenda and no one else's.

In Game of Thrones, smart people often died because they failed to prioritize loyalty. Tyrion was also smart in ways other than that - he formulated a good battle plan - but Trump is smart nearly all of the ways that would matter in that setting. He's suspicious and distrustful and able to identify his enemies and understands the importance of dominance and strength and most importantly understands the difference between the appearance of power and actual power. Trump is the guy who wouldn't make the mistakes that Ned Stark made.

On the topic of wealth, I very distinctly remember in his 2016 run that an article came out which indicated he would have have something like 2x the wealth if he had just parked his inheritance in an index fund.

Yeah, the Forbes article I linked to mentioned it. The 2016-era article got it wrong - they underestimated his then-net worth by about a billion dollars. Plus, nearly all of those articles fail to recognize that Trump has also funded a lavish lifestyle of conspicuous consumption during the several decades between his inheritance and whatever date of his then-current net worth. If you inherit money in the 1970's, and in 2016 you have the same amount of money that you would have had if you had invested it in the S&P 500, but in the intervening decades you've lived like Donald Trump has lived? Then you have truly crushed the market in your investments....