During an appearance on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, author Kurt Anderson revealed the "unheralded" secret to President Donald Trump's persistent power over MAGA voters: his own stupidity.
"He’s an idiot. He’s always been stupid," Anderson said. "And his stupidity has been an under-remarked-upon, unheralded part of his — along with the lying, along with the mental disorders—the stupidity is important.”
Anderson previously gained notoriety for his 2017 book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, which chronicled the country's centuries-long intellectual decline and embrace of "magical thinking." This trend, which saw Americans increasingly willing to accept lies, was a key factor driving Trump's ability to capture the attention of voters, though he wrote the book prior to his first election. Trump's stupidity, he argued, mirrors the conduct of past con-men, and allowed him to prey upon Americans' weakness "for being conned."
“All that stuff, which is not uniquely American, but it is definingly American,” Andersen argued. “America has always been the world leader in that kind of weak-mindedness and slippery sense of the difference between reality and fiction.”
He drew further parallels between Trump and P.T. Barnum, the co-founder of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and infamous purveyor of hoaxes.
"I mean, his first freak show was a 161-year-old woman,” podcast host Joanna Coles said. “Obviously not true. Who was the nurse to George Washington. Obviously not true. And yet people lined up to see this thing, which they knew wasn’t true. And that’s the sort of sophisticated nature of P.T. Barnum: having the audience in on the con and yet still paying to see her.”
“He didn’t hide it,” Andersen responded. “He didn’t pretend it was true. He said, ‘How do you know it’s not?’ [That] was basically his response to people. If you can’t prove it’s not and people enjoy it, then that’s entertainment.”
Anderson suggested that Trump initially operated in a similar way, spreading lies he knew were lies because of his deep "cynicism about human behavior."
"In the end, I think his deep animating feature as a person is the most horrible, unpleasant, miserable, wretched, cynicism about human behavior," Anderson said.
He noted, however, that he suspects the president "believes more of it than he did in the past," when it comes to his many lies and falsehoods.
"It’s just such an American story,” Andersen added. “This combination of religiosity, I guess sincere, and this kind of hucksterism. And that’s part of the story of America and how Trump came to be, even though he is irreligious and a nonbeliever, I think, pretty clearly. But his most devoted supporters are evangelical Christians, because once you get a country in which so much belief in any old thing you want and hear and disbelief in things that are true, anything goes."
