Comment by scarecrowbob

A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't understand why those norms are in place.

I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.

At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":

he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.

In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.

And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.

Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.