Every now and then, I'm inclined to concede that Trump isn't as stupid as I tend to claim. That leaves him still pretty stupid and to whatever extent he's by any normal standard smart, that smartness has never, ever been used in any legitimately good way. So, practically speaking, still, well, a fucking moron.
But then there's that dictating a court submission. It raises a question. What kind of imbecile of a POTUS spends a second on that insane bullshit, specially one even more tired than he accused of Biden being? Only people more stupid are the people who've voted for him in the past, but mostly those who voted for him (or passed on voting) in 2024.
And another fresh milestone in POTUS imbecility: So I'm at the gym 28 April around 8:30 ET (pinpointing the time because anything could have happened in the past ~3 hours) and I see a chyron on CNN to the effect that Donny's not all that excited by Iran's proposal. And I think: For all the bluster and performances from him and the other POS with which he surrounded himself with his party's support, neither he nor they have made any credible statement of what they want that is at all, at least at this time, not a complete surrender by Iran.
What Your Cat Understands About Donald Trump That Most Democrats Don't
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for THE PUGILIST
Apr 19, 2026
This morning I received another comment on a recent post — the post in which I had compared Donald Trump to Vito Genovese — insisting the parallel was invalid. The reason given: Trump is an idiot. Too stupid to actually run anything.
I’ve been getting variations of this comment for years, always from people on the left, always offered as though it settles something. It doesn’t. It reveals, instead, a failure of perception that I believe is one of the most costly analytical mistakes Trump’s opponents continue to make.
When Democrats dismiss Donald Trump as too stupid to be effective, they lose. They’ve been losing that bet for a decade, and they will keep losing it for the same reason a person might call a shark stupid for not doing algebra. The shark isn’t trying to do algebra. That’s not what it’s for.
There are different kinds of intelligence in the world. A cat cannot discuss philosophy, but it can do lots of things we can’t. It can jump six times its own height from standing, catch a hummingbird in flight, and twist itself mid-fall to land on its feet. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. We do not call ourselves stupid for lacking gifts that simply fall outside another creature’s metric. We should extend the same analytical honesty to Donald Trump — not to admire him, but to see him clearly, which is something his opponents have catastrophically failed to do.
Trump is, by most conventional measures, a deeply limited man. His reading is reportedly poor. His attention span is narrow. His grasp of history, policy, science, and law is weak at best. At the kind of intelligence most of us value — the capacity for empathy, for genuine human connection, for moral reasoning — he is, by the evidence of his entire life, essentially deficient. But none of that intelligence is required to run the Mafia. Or, as it turns out, the government.
What Trump possesses instead is something rarer and more dangerous than most of his critics have been willing to name: he may be the greatest con artist and mob operator the world has ever produced — quite simply the most effective sociopath to ever walk this earth. Consider the scale of what he has accomplished. He convinced tens of millions of working-class Americans that a Manhattan real estate heir who spent decades extracting wealth from contractors, students, investors, and tenants is their champion against elites. That is a con of staggering audacity — and it has not merely survived exposure, it has fed on it. Every indictment became a fundraising event. Every scandal became evidence of persecution. He somehow engineered a fraud immune to the mechanism that ends all frauds. Is that stupidity? I’d say it’s a form of operational genius. Repugnant, yes. Not something most people would want to do or be proud of. But a kind of genius nonetheless.
The organizational structure around Trump is not merely like organized crime — it is structurally identical to it: loyalty oaths, omertà culture, intermediaries for dirty work, pardons dangled as currency, defectors punished, soldiers rewarded. No Mafia don in history ran that kind of operation at the scale of a nation-state, with a major political party as his instrument. The Gambinos controlled parts of New York. The Cartels each have their little patch of Mexico or Colombia. But Trump? He controls half of America’s political reality, and all of its government at the moment. He captured the judiciary and the house. And he did it by being a con man. The comparison to Genovese is not hyperbole. It is taxonomy.
His critics might object that Hitler, too, was this kind of operator — and they would be right, which is precisely the point. Hitler was also mostly a moron, but with one special, horrible gift. Hollywood has done us a grave disservice with its brooding, thoughtful Nazi officers, staring meaningfully into the middle distance. Screenwriters projected their own fantasy of what powerful evil looks like onto men who were, in most respects, idiots and buffoons — gifted only in the precise ways that mattered for what they were trying to do. Only Charlie Chaplin, working from the music hall tradition, understood that buffoonery and menace are not opposites. His portrait of the dictator in The Great Dictator is psychologically truer than almost anything that followed. Hannah Arendt reached for the same truth at Nuremberg, finding not a monster in the dock but a mediocre bureaucrat — the banality of evil, she called it, to the outrage of people who needed evil to be smarter and more interesting than it is.
Trump is not more interesting than he appears. He is exactly as venal, as shallow, as reflexive as his critics say. But he is, within his own operational domain, essentially unrivaled at being evil. His cunning is largely instinctual rather than strategic, for he, like all other serial killers, lacks a conscience entirely — he wins by smell more than by plan, which is why his operation is chaotic even when it’s effective — but the results speak for themselves. Decades of survival. A second term. A country reorganized around his appetites.
We do not need to think the rattlesnake is “smart” to respect what it can do. We do not need to grant Trump the kind of intelligence we value to acknowledge the kind he has, that most of us, mercifully, lack. Calling him stupid is not accurate, because it is a failure of perception — and it is one his most sanctimonious opponents keep paying for.
I saw the piece. But between his father (mafia-adjacent) and Roy Cohn, Donny has been a pseudo-mobster wannabe godfather throughout adulthood. Then post-Cohn, and FBI snitch and thereby maybe (with Rudy) making NYC safe for the Russian mafia. Allegedly, but I assume that around the point that he and James Kallstrom became BFFs.
Our Donny: The surface is shit then, when you get beneath the surface, it’s magnitudes worse.
The DOJ's spiraling descent into a "TruthSocial" caricature of "legal" filings cannot be topped by the "ballroom" filing, and the fact that yet another trumpy mouthpiece lawyer — the disreputable Stanley Woodward of MAL documents-case fame — put his name to it absolutely seals the deal. Even a correspondence-school lawyer would go bright-red in shame should he present this "filing" into a courtroom. But shame, malpractice, and self-abasement are held in abeyance for those in service of trump, where NO floor exists for minimal competence and legal standards.
Once again, one must invoke The Onion in judging the "merits" of the ballroom filing, as in no way can the document be viewed other than a hilarious parody of trumpist themes and grievances.
I am 100% with Garret Graff here on the truly nefarious reason behind the new "ballroom".
T and his rampaging illegal administration of all three branches of government don't care about the blatant illegality of their actions. They revel in it because they never intend to cede power again. Why do we need more evidence than Jan 6? The coup succeeded after all, beyond their wildest dreams -- just took another 4 years. Now they hold all the levers of government and are doing everything to destroy it to hurt everyone but themselves (and their donors) because they can. Who is going to stop them, after all? No one with any constitutionally allotted power has been able to do so yet if they've even tried.
So, when Graff writes about the new bunker : "Strong enough to sustain a hostile attack? Absolutely! Strong enough to withstand the end of democracy? Absolutely not." The answer to that last question in the tiny deranged feverish mind of the criminal in chief is WELL DUH.
Ask yourself what would have happened on January 6 2021 had T & co (not pence) had a long-term defensible hidey hole in which they could entrench themselves and refuse to leave? Many of us, including some in the media, worried that he would refuse to leave on Jan 20, 2021. Now he won't have to.
(... not that I have hopes of a fair election happening in 2028, but that's a doomscroll thought for another day)
I hope I am proven wrong eventually. Until then yes absolutely Congress - at least the parts of Congress that haven't already handed over the reins to the orange one - should have some interjections here to gum up the works. I won't hold my breath.
Every now and then, I'm inclined to concede that Trump isn't as stupid as I tend to claim. That leaves him still pretty stupid and to whatever extent he's by any normal standard smart, that smartness has never, ever been used in any legitimately good way. So, practically speaking, still, well, a fucking moron.
But then there's that dictating a court submission. It raises a question. What kind of imbecile of a POTUS spends a second on that insane bullshit, specially one even more tired than he accused of Biden being? Only people more stupid are the people who've voted for him in the past, but mostly those who voted for him (or passed on voting) in 2024.
And another fresh milestone in POTUS imbecility: So I'm at the gym 28 April around 8:30 ET (pinpointing the time because anything could have happened in the past ~3 hours) and I see a chyron on CNN to the effect that Donny's not all that excited by Iran's proposal. And I think: For all the bluster and performances from him and the other POS with which he surrounded himself with his party's support, neither he nor they have made any credible statement of what they want that is at all, at least at this time, not a complete surrender by Iran.
I could go on but nah.
What Your Cat Understands About Donald Trump That Most Democrats Don't
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for THE PUGILIST
Apr 19, 2026
This morning I received another comment on a recent post — the post in which I had compared Donald Trump to Vito Genovese — insisting the parallel was invalid. The reason given: Trump is an idiot. Too stupid to actually run anything.
I’ve been getting variations of this comment for years, always from people on the left, always offered as though it settles something. It doesn’t. It reveals, instead, a failure of perception that I believe is one of the most costly analytical mistakes Trump’s opponents continue to make.
When Democrats dismiss Donald Trump as too stupid to be effective, they lose. They’ve been losing that bet for a decade, and they will keep losing it for the same reason a person might call a shark stupid for not doing algebra. The shark isn’t trying to do algebra. That’s not what it’s for.
There are different kinds of intelligence in the world. A cat cannot discuss philosophy, but it can do lots of things we can’t. It can jump six times its own height from standing, catch a hummingbird in flight, and twist itself mid-fall to land on its feet. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. We do not call ourselves stupid for lacking gifts that simply fall outside another creature’s metric. We should extend the same analytical honesty to Donald Trump — not to admire him, but to see him clearly, which is something his opponents have catastrophically failed to do.
Trump is, by most conventional measures, a deeply limited man. His reading is reportedly poor. His attention span is narrow. His grasp of history, policy, science, and law is weak at best. At the kind of intelligence most of us value — the capacity for empathy, for genuine human connection, for moral reasoning — he is, by the evidence of his entire life, essentially deficient. But none of that intelligence is required to run the Mafia. Or, as it turns out, the government.
What Trump possesses instead is something rarer and more dangerous than most of his critics have been willing to name: he may be the greatest con artist and mob operator the world has ever produced — quite simply the most effective sociopath to ever walk this earth. Consider the scale of what he has accomplished. He convinced tens of millions of working-class Americans that a Manhattan real estate heir who spent decades extracting wealth from contractors, students, investors, and tenants is their champion against elites. That is a con of staggering audacity — and it has not merely survived exposure, it has fed on it. Every indictment became a fundraising event. Every scandal became evidence of persecution. He somehow engineered a fraud immune to the mechanism that ends all frauds. Is that stupidity? I’d say it’s a form of operational genius. Repugnant, yes. Not something most people would want to do or be proud of. But a kind of genius nonetheless.
The organizational structure around Trump is not merely like organized crime — it is structurally identical to it: loyalty oaths, omertà culture, intermediaries for dirty work, pardons dangled as currency, defectors punished, soldiers rewarded. No Mafia don in history ran that kind of operation at the scale of a nation-state, with a major political party as his instrument. The Gambinos controlled parts of New York. The Cartels each have their little patch of Mexico or Colombia. But Trump? He controls half of America’s political reality, and all of its government at the moment. He captured the judiciary and the house. And he did it by being a con man. The comparison to Genovese is not hyperbole. It is taxonomy.
His critics might object that Hitler, too, was this kind of operator — and they would be right, which is precisely the point. Hitler was also mostly a moron, but with one special, horrible gift. Hollywood has done us a grave disservice with its brooding, thoughtful Nazi officers, staring meaningfully into the middle distance. Screenwriters projected their own fantasy of what powerful evil looks like onto men who were, in most respects, idiots and buffoons — gifted only in the precise ways that mattered for what they were trying to do. Only Charlie Chaplin, working from the music hall tradition, understood that buffoonery and menace are not opposites. His portrait of the dictator in The Great Dictator is psychologically truer than almost anything that followed. Hannah Arendt reached for the same truth at Nuremberg, finding not a monster in the dock but a mediocre bureaucrat — the banality of evil, she called it, to the outrage of people who needed evil to be smarter and more interesting than it is.
Trump is not more interesting than he appears. He is exactly as venal, as shallow, as reflexive as his critics say. But he is, within his own operational domain, essentially unrivaled at being evil. His cunning is largely instinctual rather than strategic, for he, like all other serial killers, lacks a conscience entirely — he wins by smell more than by plan, which is why his operation is chaotic even when it’s effective — but the results speak for themselves. Decades of survival. A second term. A country reorganized around his appetites.
We do not need to think the rattlesnake is “smart” to respect what it can do. We do not need to grant Trump the kind of intelligence we value to acknowledge the kind he has, that most of us, mercifully, lack. Calling him stupid is not accurate, because it is a failure of perception — and it is one his most sanctimonious opponents keep paying for.
I saw the piece. But between his father (mafia-adjacent) and Roy Cohn, Donny has been a pseudo-mobster wannabe godfather throughout adulthood. Then post-Cohn, and FBI snitch and thereby maybe (with Rudy) making NYC safe for the Russian mafia. Allegedly, but I assume that around the point that he and James Kallstrom became BFFs.
Our Donny: The surface is shit then, when you get beneath the surface, it’s magnitudes worse.
The DOJ's spiraling descent into a "TruthSocial" caricature of "legal" filings cannot be topped by the "ballroom" filing, and the fact that yet another trumpy mouthpiece lawyer — the disreputable Stanley Woodward of MAL documents-case fame — put his name to it absolutely seals the deal. Even a correspondence-school lawyer would go bright-red in shame should he present this "filing" into a courtroom. But shame, malpractice, and self-abasement are held in abeyance for those in service of trump, where NO floor exists for minimal competence and legal standards.
Once again, one must invoke The Onion in judging the "merits" of the ballroom filing, as in no way can the document be viewed other than a hilarious parody of trumpist themes and grievances.
I am 100% with Garret Graff here on the truly nefarious reason behind the new "ballroom".
T and his rampaging illegal administration of all three branches of government don't care about the blatant illegality of their actions. They revel in it because they never intend to cede power again. Why do we need more evidence than Jan 6? The coup succeeded after all, beyond their wildest dreams -- just took another 4 years. Now they hold all the levers of government and are doing everything to destroy it to hurt everyone but themselves (and their donors) because they can. Who is going to stop them, after all? No one with any constitutionally allotted power has been able to do so yet if they've even tried.
So, when Graff writes about the new bunker : "Strong enough to sustain a hostile attack? Absolutely! Strong enough to withstand the end of democracy? Absolutely not." The answer to that last question in the tiny deranged feverish mind of the criminal in chief is WELL DUH.
Ask yourself what would have happened on January 6 2021 had T & co (not pence) had a long-term defensible hidey hole in which they could entrench themselves and refuse to leave? Many of us, including some in the media, worried that he would refuse to leave on Jan 20, 2021. Now he won't have to.
(... not that I have hopes of a fair election happening in 2028, but that's a doomscroll thought for another day)
I hope I am proven wrong eventually. Until then yes absolutely Congress - at least the parts of Congress that haven't already handed over the reins to the orange one - should have some interjections here to gum up the works. I won't hold my breath.
The proposed bunker: it's to enable him and oodles of 'close, personal' friends to never leave the wh--right??
Cookie Monster has the perfect answer to your question: "I cannot believe you ask such dumb question." :-)