No. of Recommendations: 4
It occurs to me...how are you defining "intelligence"? We may be talking about two completely different things.
To me, "intelligence" is the ability to take in, process, and assimilate new information, and then adapt. The Felon is incapable of these things. He doesn't appear to figure out anything.
Oh, I disagree. He's very good at taking in new information - just not the categories of information that you (and I) would want to see a President interested in. He's very good at reading people, finding their weaknesses, and using that to his advantage. Like any good salesman/con man, he's very good at seeing how his "pitches" are landing with his target audience and modulating them based on that feedback. That was the essence of his campaign rallies, where he would continuously be trying out various messages and speech lines and seeing which ones were received favorably and which ones weren't. He voraciously consumes TV coverage of his administration and responds to it, which is the essence of "taking in, processing, assimilating new information and then adapting to it."
That's certainly not how you or I would run a Presidency, and it's not the classic way. The President is in charge of the greatest information-gathering apparatus in the world. "Normal" information flows involve those agencies presenting the President with important information in the form of reports or personal briefings, and the President acting on that information to make decisions.
Trump doesn't trust anyone in the building. He doesn't think they'll give him straight answers, and he doesn't think they have information he needs to make his decisions. He's running based on information about the world he gets from other sources.
I think that's foolhardy bordering on terrible....but that's very different from Trump being an idiot.
Someone like Tyrion would have strategized and torn him apart because Tyrion actually was intelligent (by the above definition). Or Tywin...Tywin won wars without actually fighting. The Felon would have been completely out of his depth.
Again, I think that's completely wrong. Tyrion and Tywin were successful in that environment because they did the sorts of things that Trump is good at doing. Tyrion's success lay in using his enormous wealth as a cudgel/bribe, buying unscrupulous people that would stay bought by him, valuing personal loyalty over niceties like honor, using his personal power as the Hand to break the rules and wrongfully expel people he deemed were insufficiently loyal, and the like. All of Trump's business deals and current grifts are exactly that model - put your counterparties in a "offer they can't refuse" position based on your position of strength and squeeze them to your advantage. Tyrion and Tywin are more eloquent than Trump - not surprising considering they are portrayed by accomplished actors and have professional writers penning their speeches - but they're mostly playing the game using the same moves that Trump uses routinely. Specifically, unfairly bullying everyone who's weaker or poorer than they are to force them to do things to their own personal (or "House Lannister") advantage.
That's the message of GoT. People who believe in "the rules" rather than the gross exercise of power, physical strength, or subordinating the weak will end up being punished no matter how smart they are, while people who see the world as it is (a kill-or-be-killed contest where honor and justice are irrelevant and dominating everyone in your environment is the only thing that matters) are the ones who succeed. Now then - who does that description sound like?
