Ask A Genius 1158: Trump and Walz at the Time
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/11
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s going on with Trump’s party?
Rick Rosner: Yesterday, Trump was holding another rally, and it was hot. Two people fainted. That somehow gave Trump the excuse to stop taking questions from the audience. He’d only taken four, and then he decided instead to play music. For 39 minutes, he played songs and kind of half-danced. It was weird. It led to people who don’t like Trump asking on social media, “Does this say anything about him? Is his brain turning to shit?” And it’s hard to tell.
Though no other candidate could do something as weird as that without suffering more repercussions than he does.
Jacobsen: What do you think Walz does that’s weird?
Rosner: Walz pretty much claims that he speaks too exuberantly and without thinking. For instance, people who are against the Democrats try to make big things out of things he’s said. For instance, he said he carried a weapon of war during the war. Republicans tried to call this “stolen honor” because, while he was in the National Guard for 24 years and deployed to Europe as support staff for the Afghan war, he wasn’t deployed directly to Afghanistan. When you’re staging a war in Europe, or wherever Afghanistan is, you need additional staff at various bases to support that effort. He was deployed, but not to Afghanistan. So, people showed a clip of him saying that and criticized him for saying he wasn’t in a war.
Jacobsen: And did that change people’s minds?
Rosner: No, his job was gunnery sergeant, and he trained people in the use of artillery to the point where he had to have surgery on his ears to restore his hearing. But he didn’t fire this stuff in a war. But he did. Another thing more recently was that he claimed to have been in Hong Kong when the Chinese brutally suppressed and killed protesters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Somebody looked it up and found out he wasn’t in China when that happened. He was there a month before or after, or some shit.
Jacobsen: Does any of this matter?
Rosner: None of it seems to be a smoking gun that disqualifies him as a candidate. Yesterday or the day before, there was a photo of him out in a field in hunting gear. Then, further footage showed that he was having trouble loading his rifle, which is weird. He didn’t know the official term for some shoulder pad that protects you against the recoil from your rifle.
All of it, to me at least, has the taint of people who don’t want Harris or Walz trying to come up with something to make him look bad and coming up short. There was some story that he was head of his school’s faculty sponsor and helped the kids at the school start a gay-straight alliance or a gay club. He and his wife took a student to an Indigo Girls concert.
I didn’t go deeply into this because it’s more of the same horse shit. Then somebody went on social media, on Twitter, falsely claiming to have been that student and said that Walz had sex with him.
So, none of this strikes me as Walz being particularly weird. But what does he do that’s weird? The various candidates have been attacking each other for being not smart. Trump called Harris retarded. I would say that Trump is definitely not smart.
He may have been kind of smart when he was younger, but his laziness over the decades has made him, in effect, not smart. Plus, he’s 78 now and mentally a little glitchy. When it comes to the other candidates, teachers on average aren’t necessarily brilliant. There’s a chance that Walls and his wife aren’t geniuses but are nice, reasonable people. There’s also a chance that Harris isn’t a genius. We’ve talked about it—there have only been a couple of geniuses who’ve been president.
Teddy Roosevelt. Somebody who knows presidential history better than me said that, I guess, John Quincy Adams was a genius. But genius is not a requirement for being a good president. Trump has attacked Biden for being not smart. I don’t think Biden’s a genius either. But Biden has been in national politics for 50 years.
So he’s deeply experienced. 36 years in the Senate, 8 as VP. He knows how to get things done. He’s no Stephen Hawking, but the experience has been deeply helpful. So, I don’t think anybody in this election cycle has profound intelligence. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, went to Oxford. However smart he was, it didn’t stop him from jizzing on Monica Lewinsky. Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer aboard a submarine, wasn’t he?
His smarts didn’t stop him from being a one-term president. So, of the various candidates for president and VP, Trump is definitely the dumbest, to the point where it’s a problem. He’s probably the dumbest president of our lifetimes. But nobody else being a genius disqualifies them from being president or VP. So, you asked, and that’s a roundabout way of answering your question. The weirdest thing about Walls that comes to mind immediately is how ordinary he is. He’s a regular guy. Which is fine. Because I’d argue that statistically, if you wanted to look at the presidency, president by president, in terms of smarts, maybe the average intelligence of a president is slightly above average. Somewhere between the average IQ of a college graduate with a BA and a graduate with a master’s or PhD. Somewhere in between there.
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