I always see people commenting that Trump is stupid or dumb, and doesn’t understand what he’s doing. I have to disagree.

In a way Trump is an idiot savant — he’s not intelligent in the sense of being able to make logical connections or understand history or analyze patterns. But he’s extremely good at reading people to know how best to manipulate them. He has the same skills a sociopathic criminal or a con man has. It’s a sort of low cunning rather than what we think of as “intelligence,” but when someone is as good at it as Trump is, they’re very dangerous because they aren’t constrained by the normal human boundaries of empathy.

Everything Trump says and does is for one goal only: to benefit Trump, and secondarily his family. Although I suspect if push came to shove he’d toss his family overboard to save himself in a heartbeat.