Trump, Showing Stable Genius

DONALD TRUMP described himself as a "stable genius", amid a flurry of suggestions that he was neither. Legend has it that he made this comment after passing a test which confirmed that he indeed did not, as of then, suffer from dementia. Things change. Another urban legend is that when Trump was a teenager, hs crusty but perceptive mother warned that her son was an idiot, and that she hoped he never chose politics as a career. Be carfeul what you wish for. More commonly held views on the former and perhaps future president seem to trend in the other direction, away from stable genius; that he is not, as the saying goes, the most brilliant light on the Christmas tree, or however the saying goes. Precisely how intelligent is our former and perhaps future leader? There is a lack of verifiable measurement. Trump has never acceded to publicly release any of his adademic records, including formal intelligence tests, perhaps wisely. Anecdotal evidence, our only remaining source of evidence, does not yield auspicious indications. Eyebrows were reaised when, in the midst of his first and perhaps only term as president, he weighed in on the sustainable energy debate by asserting that there exists the possiblity that windmills cause cancer. Regarding the increasing severity of all weather patterns, including storms, Trump, who does not believe in climate change, or that if the climate has changed it will change back, asked why hurricanes can't be dispersed by dropping a nuclear bomb on them. Science might not be his best subject. The Covid 19 epidemic caught his attention, belatedly. When he finally started showing executive leadership during the height of the crises, he reminded us that the great influenza epidemic of 1917 had ended World War II. Revisionist history, if ever there were. There would be no Covid epidemic of two thousand and twenty, he asserted, if only we would stop testing people for it. When that suggetion failed to gain traction, the then president offfered advice on treatments; bleach injected into human lungs, the oral administration of medicine normally used to deworm horses, or, in extrems cases, both. The Donald was not done gving health related advice. Exercise is harmful to one's health, he clearly articulated, because it drains away energy from the human body which could be put to better purposes, presumably, metabolizing. History and politics do not escape his attention. During a Fourth of July speech in 2019, the then president praised George Washington and his continental army for having captured every airport in the thirteen colonies. While welcoming the president of Italy to the White house, President Trump bragged that friendship between italy and the United States dates all the way back to the time of Julius Caesar. The Italian president shuffled her feet, and looked at her shoes. Geo politically, India and China do not share a common border, America's top representative mentioned to Indian President Modi. And why, Mr. Trump once asked, perhpas rhetorically, can we not simply refer to Great Britain and the United Kingdom as "England"? Well, sir, we can...Ever transactional, Trump demonstrated his geographic savvy by asking whether it might be possible to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. A further implied benefit would be a decline in the dark pigmentation of the average member of an American protectorate. The trading deadline passed, no deal was struck, America remained imperialistically a darker shade of brown. The same effect was achieved by Trump's assertion that famed abolitionist Frederick Douglas is still very much alive. Donald Trump was witnessed staring at the sun during a solar eclipse. Either he stared at it too long, or not long enough.