A poster on the kitchen wall of a friend read, “If you’re so darned smart, why ain’t you rich,” the clear implication being that intelligent people get rich and also suggesting that if you are rich, you are intelligent.
As an ex-teacher at an expensive private school for the rich, I can assure you that’s not true, but it continues be a part of the American mind-set. Trump has repeatedly claimed to be a genius (and a stable genius) without showing much evidence of anything more than above-average intelligence is an illustration.
He has been repeatedly asked for his IQ scores to substantiate his claim, but none has been forthcoming. And the indisputable proof, his many business failures give testament to mediocre judgment as well as intelligence.
To my knowledge, Musk has not made that claim, but people assume that because he is the richest man in the world that he is really bright. Proof? Just that he’s rich.
Thus we now have two leaders who are no dummies but probably nothing special, trying to upset the way our government runs by laying off workers, consolidating and eliminating agencies in areas neither of them have any deep experience.
That we have chaos in the government right now should have been seen by even the meanest intelligence. Trump is faced with a bureaucracy of mostly competent people, some of whom are experts, but now he wants to fire, reorganize them with no clue about what they are doing or how to do it.
Ditto with Musk’s fight with X employees, 2,000 of whom are still fighting his broken promises to them. Just before the ’24 presidential election, the Fidelity Group estimated that X had lost 79% of its value, partly because of employee discontent. Right now, Tesla workers are asking Musk to resign from his position in the Tesla Company because of his damage to it.
The point being that whatever strengths either or both of them have, those strengths are not relevant in their present applications.
Musk’s areas of incompetence, his egoism, his increasing silliness and media stunts were especially obvious in the last couple years. Trump’s promise to pardon virtually all the convicted 1-6 rioters, his vengeful firings, his tariffs and wish to continue his tax cut to the rich, his love of Putin were all obvious well before the election to anyone paying attention.
It seems, though, that Cape May County voters weren’t paying close attention or even any attention at all.
Thus, what we have right now is a silly egoist taking an axe to various programs that he doesn’t understand, using the media to announce great progress in the laudable goal of examining federal agency efficiency with little understanding of how government works supported by a president who might know even less.
Nothing illustrates this silliness more than Musk’s boasting about finding an $8 billion mistake in ICE’s budget when it was actually $8 million, or the purported savings by cutting $600 million in USAID contracts when it was actually $18 million in savings.
All with the backing of our billionaire president and with Republicans like Van Drew in our Congress.
I certainly hope that God blesses America, because we’re going to need His blessings, and need them fast.
Bruce Allen, Del Haven
