As the midterms approach, Trump starts subtly insulting his own supporters

President Donald Trump has spent the past week making remarks that, MS NOW's Steve Benen argues, amount to subtle put-downs of his own backers. At a science summit, Trump told the room it was an unusually high-IQ audience "for a change." Two days later, at a Tennessee campaign rally, he said the adoration there was such that he could say foolish things and still get applause, and some attendees promptly did applaud.

On Wednesday in Arizona, during an unscripted stretch about his own intelligence, Trump described the cognitive test he has taken as standard yet difficult. He began to say that few people in the crowd could pass it, then broke off. He added that doctors were stunned by his performance, and called himself a genius. He also recounted that Joe Biden could not pick out the lion from a set of animals.

Benen notes that such screenings are meant to detect dementia and similar decline, not to rank intelligence, so passing them sets a modest bar. He adds that Trump finding it hard is itself worrying, and that a 2018 Washington Post analysis expected nearly any healthy adult to do well.

Summarized by PolitiKool from MS NOW’s reporting. Read the full story at MS NOW →