Let’s Be Clear: Trump Doesn’t Understand What “Intelligence” Even Means Because He Himself is Not Intelligent

By now you’ve undoubtedly joined the millions mourning the deaths of dozens of Americans because of the mid-air collision near Ronald Reagon Washington National Airport on Wednesday night. And hopefully like many Americans, you’ve sat, angered and dumbstruck at the callous name-calling and blaming of DEI initiatives on that horrific disaster by Donald Trump and his administration.

While Trump presented absolutely zero proof that DEI initiatives had anything at all to do with the disaster (shocking, I know), I’m particularly interested in the language that he used to decry these initiatives, as his comments not only reek of racism, they demonstrate fairly clearly that Trump himself has very little understanding of what qualifies someone to do the various government jobs he’s supposedly looking to improve upon in the first place.

"We must have only the highest standards for people who work in our aviation system," Trump stated in a White House media briefing. Ok, yes, I can get behind that. These people are responsible for the lives of thousands, after all, why wouldn’t you want the best? But then he went on to suggest that under his guidance, “Only the highest aptitude, the highest intellect, and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers.”

That’s an interesting choice of words.

"I always felt that this was a job that had to have superior intelligence,” he said, stating that these jobs should be performed only by "naturally talented geniuses,” before criticizing the Biden administration for allegedly allowing people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities to perform jobs within the FAA.

First, it should be noted that aptitude is not really the same thing as talent is not at all the same thing as intelligence.

• Aptitude is the natural ability to do something.

• Talent can mean a natural ability to do something but can also be a learned ability to do something.

• Intelligence is an entirely different beast altogether but is completely unrelated to aptitude and talent above. Intelligence is the capacity for learning, for abstract and critical thinking, for creativity, for reasoning and planning, and a whole lot more.

Now let’s put it all together: one can be born good at something (aptitude), they can learn to get better at something (talent), but our individual intelligence is what it is and varies greatly from person to person–our IQs typically don’t climb over time (I’m almost 100% certain Trump would argue this and lose).

So, if I’m reading Trump’s comments correctly here, and he’s not a particularly complicated person so I’m going to assume that I am, he’s saying that:

1. Our nation’s geniuses should immediately be deployed to run the Federal Aviation Administration–sorry Elon, we’ve got a new job for you ;)

2. These folks should absolutely not be diverse in any way–i.e., only white heterosexual males from here on out or, you know, women who don’t mind that good ol’ locker room talk

3. They should not suffer from a single disability of any kind–that’s right, no diabetics or anyone with anything less than 20/20 vision please, and definitely not anyone that’s ever been depressed, taken a valium, seen a psychologist, been to therapy, seen a marriage counselor, experienced any form of PTSD, gotten angry while sitting in line at the DMV, worked at a post office, had a bout of road rage, talked back to a parent or school teacher, argued with their husband (women only, obviously a man can put their wives in their place in the Happy Meal Land of McPublicans!), flipped a stranger the bird, hung up on a debt collector, told their boss to ‘take this job and shove it,’ etc.

Ignoring the obvious fact that most modern-day geniuses probably wouldn’t accept the $95K annual median salary of an air traffic controller when there are 6 and 7 figure incomes to be made in booming fields like AI or biotechnologies, the above statements should feel all too familiar to anyone with even the slightest familiarity with Nazi Germany. Hitler considered people with physical or mental disabilities as having no use or value to society, going so far as to view them as a threat to the purity of the race. They were then targeted for murder.

Is this an extreme take? Maybe. Maybe not. Thankfully I don’t live in Trump’s brain so I can’t say what he means by any of this nonsense, but what I can say is this: here is a man, the President of the United States of America, openly suggesting that there are now two classes of people working in the country: the superior and the inferior.

Well, two can play that game.

Given his clear lack of understanding of basic concepts like intellect, skill, and education, and how all three work together, I know which one of the two he is, and it’s definitely not “superior.” And given the events of the short 20^th century world history lesson above, it’s downright dangerous that he’s speaking to the masses in this manner.

I guarantee you that if you don’t see anything wrong with his baffling and tasteless rhetoric, you’re not in the superior column either.