You likely recall a book titled The Smartest Guys in the Room from a decade or so ago. It covered Enron’s meteoric rise and ignominious fall. In full disclosure, I did not read it, but I offer in my defense that only persons who were shipwrecked on an abandoned island with nothing but a coconut for company would not have been steeped in the news of the day.
In school, you likely experienced classroom interactions in which a very few of the students participated actively. They were not always the smartest kids in the room; they were more likely the least inhibited and most intrepid. I know. I was one of them. It was like that in the world of work as well.
It isn’t always the most outspoken voices that have the best ideas. That’s why nominal group process is so valuable.
That aside, this evening I found myself thinking about the Dumbest Guy in the Room because there was a news snippet of His Most Ripe & Odorous Diaper plagiarizing a Ronald Regan speech in which Reagan asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
Trump has a tell that reveals that he doesn’t really know anything – that he is the dumbest guy in the room but thinks that he can bamboozle you into believing that he is the smartest. It is kind of Jedi Brain Fart. He takes common, agreed-upon, knowledge and revises it so that he can create a plausible alternate narrative that makes him the authority and makes everyone else less certain about what they know.
Let me give you some examples. During the early days of the COVID pandemic, he often referenced The Influenza Pandemic of 1917. Although his spokespersons said that he meant 1918, he repeated the 1917 date numerous times. He was gaslighting the audience. When he was asked during a town hall meeting about an estimated 22 veterans committing suicide daily, he corrected the young person asking the question saying that it was probably 25 (or some such). His correction was just a way of asserting his dominance – “I know more about this than you do even if your numbers are the most often cited.”
So, tonight, plagiarizing Reagan, he asked, “Are you better off now than you were five years ago?” If we take the question literally, then he’s asking about 2019 – the unfolding of the COVID apocalypse, school closures, an economic slowdown marked by job losses rather than job creation, tens and then hundreds of thousands of deaths, bodies piling up in freezers, stalled supply chains, food and consumable shortages – a focking apocalypse to which he contributed little but misinformation and chaos.
I must be part Toydarian (the character Watto from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) and simply not susceptible to Trump’s Jedi Brain Farts.