CNN’s conventional wisdom guru, Chris Cillizza asserts yet another questionable premise: namely that anyone believed Trump was smart.
In the wake of Trump’s absolutely stunning 2016 victory, the conventional wisdom — in political circles — was that Trump was a strategic genius, always seeing five moves ahead. He was playing three-dimensional chess while the media was still trying to figure out which way pawns could move. The reason no one thought Trump could win was because “we” didn’t see the whole board the way he did. No one else saw it that way. Trump was a genius. An unconventional genius but a genius nonetheless.
Every after-action report of the 2016 campaign has put the lie to that idea. Trump and his team didn’t think they were going to win. Many of them thought they were going to be blown out. The idea that Trump was executing some sort of master plan and always knew he was going to shock the world just isn’t borne out.
(click here to continue reading Donald Trump is playing 0-dimensional chess – CNNPolitics.)
I’ll admit to avoiding the talking heads on cable news shows as much as possible, but I’m curious about this. Are there really intelligent, well-read people1 who sincerely believed Trump was a genius? Really? These people should be fired immediately. Trump has been a stain on America for decades, he wasn’t an unknown quantity in 2016, could anyone with a straight face claim Trump was brilliant? Even after the Birther nonsense? The Central Park 5? Trump never hid his ignorance, his willful blustering lies and misreading of history. Maybe the chattering class that surrounds Chris Cillizza thinks Trump was a genius, if so, they are even more removed from the mainstream than I suspected.
or as Congresman Ted Lieu tweeted:
Analogy of @realDonaldTrump playing zero-dimensional chess is not quite accurate. Actually, Trump is playing Solitaire without a full deck. https://t.co/HZG5AK4R2G
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu)
Footnotes:
- who don’t work for Breitbart or Fox or any of their satellite offices [↩]