Erpy: I don't think the issue is lack of intelligence as much as lack of intellectual curiosity. Someone can be very intelligent yet when faced with new information that contradicts their preconceived notions, completely dismiss the new evidence because it'd involve acknowledging you were wrong about something. Likewise, "knowing what you don't know" has nothing to do with intelligence either. Trump's the first president who has dismissed the daily presidential intelligence briefings because he considers himself to be too smart for it.
I generally agree with this... however, I will say I remember reading Obama was also one to miss intelligence briefings a lot. This also sounds like something that came out of the biased media. Nowhere did I come to the conclusion he felt he was to smart for it, rather he didn't agree with the intelligence community and was a skeptic of their very public conclusion. Everybody really should be honestly, Trump just took it a little to far in my opinion before he had the actual reports in front of him. Since none of us have "inside knowledge" on it, it's really hard to draw any conclusion as to why he may or may not have missed his briefings. Transitions are in general, a lot of work.
Erpy: Also, I'm probably giving him less credit than you do, but I don't see Trump's election as some carefully crafted master plan where he was playing 4-dimensional chess. According to his campaign staff, even he was surprised he won. Before Comey dragged Weiner's laptop into the spotlight, Trump was spending most of his time telling the rest of the world that the election was being rigged and there were truckloads of illegitimate voters everywhere. That doesn't sound like someone who's confidently following his own carefully-laid-out plan.
I never said he knew he was going to win... I said he knew how to play to his base and what he had to do to get elected. It was pretty easy to tell that the country in many parts was moving away from the ideas championed by Obama, has been for a long time... especially if you live in rural America. Trump saw this when the left didn't, and that was pretty clear. I don't tend to agree that Comey and Russia played as big of a role as the left seems to think. It might had some impact on those in the middle, but I can assure you a lot of us felt Clinton was corrupt long before that happen.
Erpy: My impression is more that Trump ran his campaign on id and gut and things ended up working out in his favor, but several factors (like Comey's stunt, Scalia's death and the Russian hacking shenanigans) ended up breaking in his favor he had no control over.
I don't think one can deny that... I just don't agree it had as much of as an impact as the left tend to want to think. This blame everything but the real issue doesn't help anyone. Clinton lost because of Clinton.
Erpy: I suppose where we disagree here is that your impression is that Trump's merely acting like a narcissist and he's playing a role to keep people off guard while my impression is that he is a narcissist and what we see is what he's been like for the last 5 decades and he's not likely to change this late in his life.
I have no doubt he might be to an extent... but lets be real, nearly anyone seeking a form of power has some narcissistic tendencies. That's a given... you really think Clinton wasn't full of herself either... someone who admitted she has a public and private position. She wasn't likable at all and could not connect to people, even those in her own base. Trump did manage to at-least do that (to his dedicated far right wing base anyway).
Now this... this is stretching big time. Like the media did. I can understand one not liking Trump but this could have easily be interpreted as him meaning Russia won't invade with him as President... not that he didn't know that Russia invaded Crimea (which based on poll results wanted to be part of Russia anyway). Again we go back to that thing about not taking Trump literally.
Erpy: Clinton did. Whatever her faults, her broad range of knowledge and eagerness to expand it were things even her republican colleagues in the senate grudgingly admired about her. This argument does kinda comes back to my argument that this part of the job involves knowing what you don't know and one of Trump's worrying traits when faced with inconvenient information is denying it and pretending he never heard it.
I can't say I agree with you as far as Clinton... but we can leave it at that. Some of her remarks during one of the debates were a lot more confrontational than Trumps, and many felt she would have had us dragged into war before Trump would. There is also her track record with Benghazi. She may have a "broad range of knowledge and eagerness to expand" but that does little good if your prone to making poor decisions which she did arguably.
Erpy: Obviously we can never be sure, but it's fairly safe to assume that if Gore had been in the White House after the 2000 election, he wouldn't have invaded Iraq. (Bush's foreign team showed eagerness to invade there even before the election was decided, Gore never showed interest in putting Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in charge of national defense)
True, but I'm not sure we can say the same about Clinton.
Erpy: Likewise, if a crisis occurs and Trump reacts impulsively or in a disorganized way and bungles it as a result, it'll probably be safe to say Clinton would probably have handled it better, simply because impulsiveness and disorganisation simply aren't part of her character.
Again not really... her track record says otherwise.