Fear of Intelligence

I think Donald Trump is afraid perceived intelligence in people.

If he meets someone who talks at length (or really fast) about some abstruse topic, designed to put their audience on the defensive, the president must have been intimidated, when he was younger.  If course, over 79 years of being wrong-footed by 'intellectuals' gave him a lot of practice in dealing with them!  Unfortunately,  he probably borrowed some of those techniques to make himself sound smarter (than he really is).

But when he got into politics (having been taken in by his own tricks, and persuaded that he was handsomer, more intelligent, and more admired and popular than he really was) he began to speak in sentence fragments, both to disguise his declining acuity (sharpness), as well as to connect better with people whom he thought were less educated than he was.  He also took to heart the principle that people of low intelligence always bragged about how smart they were.  So to dispel the people's distrust of intellectuals, he boasts about how smart he is, hoping that they will see behind his joking reference to how sharp he is.  It gets a little tiring to keep unraveling these little deceptions, especially as it all gets clearer as we go along. 

I was suspicious about intelligent people when I was in college.  Everybody was trying hard to display their super intelligence, and so you got accustomed to it after a while.  Yes, there were some people smarter than me.  But each one was smarter than me in only particular ways, some of them in some ways, some of them in others.  I began to realize that their intelligence was less important than their motives.  I got better at discerning their motives as time went on, and I just disregarded the ones whose motives I wasn't sympathetic to (always leaving room for them to have a change of heart).  By this time, I wasn't suspicious of them too much. 

With people who want a lot of power, there seems to be a lot of pretense, a lot of play-acting.  So Trump pretends to admire certain people—Putin, Musk, Netanyahu, etc.—hoping to get something from them.

It's all very sad.  A lot of his helpers in his cabinet are also pretending.  Once he discovers this, he'll pretend that he knew all along!  It would be comic, if it wasn't so sad. 

Kay