A simple question: Why did America come to view Sarah Palin as stupid and Donald Trump as merely "uncoachable?” Some might say it's because Trump’s wealth leads people to believe he’s intelligent. I don't buy that. Americans have no problem seeing through dumb reality stars who inherit wealth. It's their favorite thing to do: sit around and make fun of them on TV.
No, I believe it was because of their sex. I believe America is giving Trump waaaay too much credit and that there’s still a pillar standing that quite frankly has no right to be: his intelligence.
Donald Trump is an extreme narcissist. Only a narcissist could be so delusional and self conscious about what his rat’s nest hair looks like, how long his fingers are, and if everyone recalls, his intelligence. How many times has Trump mentioned his Wharton education? A normal billionaire would simply let their wealth be the implicit answer to any unasked questions about their IQ. Why keep bringing it up? Because Trump's narcissistically insecure about his intelligence, and as anyone who’s read about his business failures knows, there’s good reason.
An intelligent man doesn't talk in the vague manner he does about business or government policies. An intelligent man doesn't make the kinds of mistakes he’s made when facing the kind of reward he's facing if he were to win at his current endeavor. And an intelligent man doesn't get involved with mob lawyers and enter into failed business venture after failed semi criminal venture under their tutelage. A smart man uses the incredible wealth they were born into to do almost anything except what Trump has done with his, because ultimately if a narcissist isn't respected (or at least envied) by their peers, then they haven't really WON anything, and they know it. Trump isn't respected or envied by other billionaires. They’ve always see him as a clown, they say so, and he knows it. The NY elite look down on Trump, and he admits it. That's why he took the low road. There were opportunities there for a stupid man that his betters weren't willing to take. It was really his only inevitable route, if putting his name on buildings and tricking people into thinking he had anything to do with financing, planning, or building any of them was this particular narcissist’s symbol for success.
Trump is a stupid man, with ghost winters, NY mafia and Russian ("mafia”) patrons, handlers, drug lord connections, and inherited money... and the eagerness to lie about his own contributions to building his “brand.” Like many reality stars he fell ass backwards into pop culture fame in a kind of tongue in cheek tacky way... in his case when a smart author convinced Trump to let him write his biography as a self-help style business book, because Trump didn't have a biography worth writing about.
Trump, as with Palin fell into much of it… Palin because she started on TV and as a beauty queen, and was then mentored in politics as the “princess” of the dominionist community in Alaska. Palin became a witless icon for a pillar of the conservative movement: a racist dominionist white Viking princess. In the same way, Trump came to embody another iconic pillar in the conservative Pantheon: a racist billionaire white German prince.
Palin and Trump are an experiment in putting the same person in two radically different bodies and coming from two radically different places, and seeing them end up in pretty much the same place in the modern conservative movement, with what I suspect will be very similar downward spirals.
And yet, America sees them so differently. Palin was the stupid hapless woman, utterly incompetent, broken, ignorant and illiterate beyond redemption. Trump is all those things, admits he essentially hasn't read a book (other than Hitler’s speeches), and for America, he’s the arrogant bully who just won't take advice.
I call foul.
Trump is a dumb person, with handlers and a lifetime of catchphrases he’s developed to hide behind. America wouldn't be fooled by it if we weren't so damn sexist.