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The Real Reason Trump Talks Like an Idiot | The Daily Beast Podcast
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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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Politics
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Trump is a mediocre minor reality TV star who appeals to mediocre people. He only uses basic words from a limited subset of the dictionary because that's what his audience is working with. And he himself isn't very sophisticated either, so it's not like he has to pretend. That's what makes it so appealing to the magats: he's one of them.
Trump and his followers would be a side phenomenon in any other country. The problem in the US is, lack of education and religious nonsense are becoming the norm again, so Trump's brand of populist mediocrity gained critical traction.
This was designed back in the '70s, and we started gutting education under Reagan. Now that we're two generations in, I'm not sure reversing mindsets -- especially given digital distractions -- is plausible.
Prefatorily, this is entirely my personal speculation based on examining media in the US versus other countries, and my admittedly minor knowledge of history.
Anti-intellectualism did ramp up in institutionalized education in the 70s, especially with the explicit codification of jock vs nerd, but imho this really started as an unfortunate (and later exploited) knock-on effect of anti-bourgeoisie sentiment after the Great Depression and post-war era. The "All-American" working class man stereotype being contrasted against the intellectual is something that didn't happen in e.g. late 1800s France's anti-aristocratic and anti-bourgeois streak; people viewed themselves as just as capable of matching the intellect of 'elites', rather than turning intellect into a negative attribute.
When we allowed the negative depiction of intellect to permeate entertainment media (in the 50s and especially the 60s), it really set the stage for the current anti-intellectualism we're steeped in. We start teaching kids from a young age that trying to be good at anything artistic or anything knowledge-based is cringe, or nerdy, or something losers do. I've lived in other countries, and you don't see that same effect, even in 'macho'-driven cultures.
The only two other countries I've lived in had none of our problems, but I'm getting old, so I can't speak to the current state of affairs. As an exchange student, jeans were really fucking expensive, but Birkenstocks were cheap as fuck.
In fact, anyone claiming to be proud of their country was ostracized. Guess the countries, eh?
We've brainwashed citizens into believing a nice story about how we're special and can do no wrong. I'm surprised Alex Jones didn't call the attack on a girls' school a false-flag operation.
My parents started telling me in the late '80s that I needed to stop interacting at my intellectual level, because I'd not make any friends that way. Great parenting, right there. I'm taking intermediate college algebra at ASU in third grade, and you want me to dumb it down by more years than I've been alive?
Oh yeah, this is not new for sure. The idiocracy has been in the making for decades.
Back when Trump was dating more age-appropriate women. Or already fucking underage girls ... who's to say? Does one really wake up one day and say, "You know, I'd really like some underage pussy"?
I don't know how old you are, but there were a lot of things that were tolerated in the past, and possibly found humorous in a dark humor kind of way. I remember many jokes from the 70s and 80s that involved profoundly shocking racism, paedophilia and disability-mocking, that, while off-color, you could conceivably tell to people in a bar and draw smiles. A lot of those jokes are impossible to tell today because they rightfully get you lynched or arrested.
In that light, I'm 100% convinced that Trump was fucking underage girls in the 80s and it was a-okay as long as they weren't too far from 18. While there was a legal age back then, in practice, it was more shades of inappropriate that people like Trump and his best pal Epstein tried to stay in the lighter hues of.
I'm an '80s kid and '90s teen, and I definitely saw massive shifts in what was considered appropriate. That said, even in the '90s, if she was 16 but looked 18, people didn't really bat an eye. My take is that there was a pervasive belief in certain circles that the age of consent was set too high.
Interesting that we've seen a sharp dropoff in reports of teachers fucking their students. That used to be red meat for journalism.