Smarter and tougher.

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, popped off this week that he could beat President Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Said Dimon,

I think I could beat Trump. Because I am as tough as he is. I’m smarter than he is. I would be fine.”

My question is, in what solar system is that statement true? Certainly not this one.

There is no doubt that Jamie Dimon is a smart guy. To be a CEO at that level, you have to be smart. But smarter than Donald Trump? No way.

And please let’s don’t start trotting out academic credentials. Both men are well covered in that area. Dimon holds an MBA from Harvard. Trump is a graduate of the prestigious Wharton School of Business. (Critics of Trump will, of course, point out, irrelevantly, that Trump holds only a bachelor’s degree.)

For this discussion, academic CVs constitute little more than foam on the beer. The matter in question is who is smarter. On that, Donald Trump wins hands down. Take a look at what Donald Trump has accomplished, and then consider those accomplishments against the backdrop of the hysterical, foaming-at-the-mouth resistance he has had to overcome, and Trump, it can be argued, borders on genius.

I don’t know what kind of a student Donald Trump was. If you told me he was a ‘C’ student, I’d believe you. I’m pretty sure that Donald Trump can’t hold forth on the Nash Equilibrium economic theory or quote Aristotle in the original Greek.

But I do know that what makes Donald Trump formidably smart is his near supernatural ability to recognize and distill into plain English what ordinary people are thinking. Mr. Trump has a capacity like nobody in today’s politics to recognize a problem, prioritize it and then offer an understandable prescription for fixing it.

And unlike Jamie Dimon and his fellow elites, Donald Trump understands small business owners – the backbone of the American economy – on a visceral level.

For more than 30 years, the country has been run by a bipartisan, elite cabal of (mostly) Ivy Leaguers like Jamie Dimon; people who consider themselves to be the best, brightest and smartest in whatever room they happen to occupy. Yet, from starting wars they couldn’t properly finish, to allowing China to loot American industry, to running up ruinous levels of debt, to enabling the 2008 financial meltdown, to repeatedly punting on Social Security and Medicare, to hollowing out the American middle class, to creating a healthcare fiasco, to standing impotently while American manufacturing jobs left the country; these best and brightest have, with respect to running the country, made a pig’s breakfast of it.

Hillary Clinton was heralded as the best, most qualified presidential candidate in American history. The 16 Republican hopefuls that at one time shared a stage with Donald Trump together constituted what was arguably the best voir dire in the party’s history.

Donald Trump beat them all.

Smarter, Mr. Dimon? Tougher? Don’t make me laugh.

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Paul Gleiser

Paul L. Gleiser is president of ATW Media, LLC, licensee of radio stations KTBB 97.5 FM/AM600, 92.1 The TEAM FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas.

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11 Responses

  1. L Miles says:

    What kind of pig-headed ego could possibly infect the brain of Jamie Dimon and cause his narcissistic personality disorder. Could it be that he is jealous of Trump’s accomplishments WITHOUT Trump being a member of the Swamp? Or better yet, maybe he suffers from the Plague of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” that the Swamp members feed upon in their Left-wing cocoon of visceral hatred. I find it amazing that these ego-maniacs didn’t have ANYTHING to say about the stellar (NOT) economic performance of their idol, Obama–the-Neophyte.

  2. John Mark Lester says:

    Great analysis Paul.

  3. Richard Anderson says:

    Excellent column Mr. Gleiser! You are correct on every point. Please continue with your important work.

  4. Holland Cooke says:

    Based on his comments on Puerto Rican hurricane death toll, Trump probably didn’t do well in Math class.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/09/13/trump-ignites-firestorm-over-number-hurricane-related-deaths-in-puerto-rico.amp.html

    • Paul Gleiser says:

      Once again, you’re kidding, right?

      The gleeful reporting in the media of 3,000 deaths in Puerto Rico lacks a basic bit of supporting evidence: bodies. Before academe and the media suffered the psychotic break that we now observe on a daily basis, when a hurricane blew threw and finally passed, authorities would go in and find those who died. Those deaths would be counted up and that number would be reported as the death toll resulting from the hurricane.

      But not now. Now we have to have a “study” spanning a year — this one by George Washington University. Instead of counting the dead in the wake of the storm, academicians pour over death certificates from long after the storm has passed and interview funeral directors and medical examiners and then compile and tabulate their “findings” in order to compare them to historic mortality data. (This myocardial infarction here, would it have happened in this 63 year old guy when it did anyway or was his coronary disease likely aggravated by the post-traumatic stress of the hurricane?) Numerators and denominators are duly put in their places and the calculation is done and thus emerges an “excess mortality” value that can be reported — as a total coincidence, of course — concurrently with the impact of a new hurricane upon an American shoreline during a Republican administration. (Show of hands, how many think this “study” would have been released during a Hillary Clinton presidency?)

      The entire story was conceived, written and timed for the express and sole purpose of making Donald Trump look bad. The Left got so much mileage out of hanging the near criminal post-Katrina ineptitude of Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco around the neck of George W. Bush that they thought, “Hey, this works. Let’s cobble a Katrina-esque story together and drop it on Trump.”

      Not addressed in the George Washington University “study” are the “excess mortality” figures attributable to decades of gross mismanagement and fiscal irresponsibility by the Puerto Rican government — a failure seen most vividly in the immediate and total failure of the Puerto Rican power grid. You have to go to one of the righty websites to see the image of hundreds of palettes of bottled water that were delivered by FEMA but never distributed by local authorities. That image never sees the light of day on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, et.al. Nowhere in the reporting are you ever told that federal response to disasters has for decades been predicated upon a model of “federal support, state oversight, local execution.” (I would bet $1,000 that if you asked a representative sample of 1,000 people, “Who has primary responsibility for disaster relief, state and local authorities or federal authorities?”, a huge majority would incorrectly answer “federal authorities.”)

      Nowhere in the “mainstream” media are you told that the Trump administration kept military and FEMA assets in place in Puerto Rico in larger numbers and for a longer period of time than for any major natural disaster in U.S. history.

      What you get instead is an academic “study” that attempts to smear Trump for his handling of Hurricane Maria.

      George W. Bush did everything right in responding to Katrina save for managing the gross ineptitude of Nagin and Blanco. Bush should have, as a practical rather than legally proper response, ignored the Stafford Act and declared an emergency on his own without waiting for those twin imbeciles Nagin and Blanco to make the legally required request. He didn’t. He fastidiously obeyed the law, which delayed getting help to thousands of desperate people. When the Democrats and the media jackals pounced, Bush then refused to defend himself.

      Trump isn’t Bush. Trump knows what his administration did in response to Maria, he knows that it was one of the largest mobilizations of federal disaster relief in U.S. history and he’s therefore not going to just stand mute while a bunch of lefty academics and the media trash him.

      Which is why, again, the piece makes the point that Trump is a very smart guy.

      • Holland Cooke says:

        Please clarify: You factually dispute the death count?

        • Paul Gleiser says:

          Which death count? The dead found in the immediate wake of the storm or the dead from months later as attributed by an academic model to be the result of the long-term impact of the storm? In other words the death toll from a storm expressed in the way that it has always been expressed on in a way that it has never been expressed before?

          • Holland Cooke says:

            Wild-eyed Rudy was right!
            “Truth ISN’T truth.”
            What a relief!

            Although the link I posted was from trusty Fox News, your marginalizing what you term “mainstream media” begs the question: Does that make KTBB “fringe media?” “Alternative media!” Or merely “alternative facts?”

            Either way, putting “study” in quotes – as you did multiple times – dutifully disses higher education in a manner that high school graduates dispensing daily public policy critique weekdays 11-5 there would appreciate.

          • Paul Gleiser says:

            Where and when did I ‘dis’ higher education?

            What I ‘dissed’ is an agenda-driven “study” wrapped in the cloak of respectability that higher education institutions once enjoyed more or less without question.

  5. C M Solomon says:

    Paul, I am amazed that you have the patience and dedication to respond to the incredible media/academia foolishness being believed and quoted by the hypnotized haters of President Trump that are incapable of accepting reality in any form. Your dissertation on the Puerto Rico death count was a great example of critical thinking. Is there a troll farm that spawns these incredibly inane comments that are worthless and for which I don’t even bother to read anymore? Arguing reality to rebut Left-wing fantasy is a hopeless task and never seems to work. The deception carried out in the name of “official” media opinion and dressed up as TRUTH is mind-numbing. I’m beginning to wonder if some just like to provoke you for fun and can’t possibly be serious or maybe they desire unwarranted attention. Please keep exposing the carcass rot in the dead media machine and its associated propaganda supply chain.

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