What Your Cat Understands About Donald Trump That Most Democrats Don't

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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.

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