Delusional, Hyperpartisan... or Just Plain Stupid?

Ideological blind spots and wishful thinking can only explain things so far. At some point you have to wonder if Trump supporters are only deluded, blinded by partisan loyalty... or if their ability to process data is just defective. In other words, are they stupid?

Ask a Trump supporter and what good he has done for the country, and you will inevitably hear about the stock market. Press them on this point and ask them how a president can possibly affect the stock market, and you will get this fantasy, unsupported by any evidence: lowering taxes helps the economy. Try to drill down on that point and ask how Trump’s cuts and deregulations are different than Reagan‘s, which brought the country to a crippling deficit and took eight years of Clinton austerity to repair? Or different from what Bush Junior did, which came just before the worst recession since The Big One? You will be met with such incompetent non-thinking that you will recognize the futility and give up.

Ask about anything else—the Ukraine business, the border wall, the sophomoric tweets, the trade wars—and you will either be referred back to the stock market, or you will be subjected to more wishful thinking.

I wonder how the average Trump supporter even copes in a world that increasingly requires technical competence and the ability to see through scams.

The antiabortion segment of his base may perhaps be less guilty of delusional thinking, as Trump and McConnell actually have done what they claim: they have shifted the politics of the courts.

This isn’t to say that everyone who opposes Trump does so for intelligent reasons. But it does make me wonder if the Trump base’s famous antipathy toward “elites” is just another dogwhistle.

For people smarter than them.