Idiots rule

Regardless of boasts about the size of his IQ relative to that of others, it is beyond all reasonable doubt that Donald Trump is a fucking moron. Barely a day goes by without further damning evidence of his idiocy. But Trump's continued insistence on his own intelligence just goes to prove the point made by Ariel Dorfman in an article for the New York Review Of Books: namely, that the US president is not only uninterested in evidence but openly inimical to it.

As Dorfman's piece underlines, we shouldn't simply guffaw at Trump's brazen stupidity and foot-in-mouth gaffes. The truth is that his anti-intellectualism - his "war on knowledge" - is extremely dangerous. The poisonous cocktail of anti-regulatory legislation, muzzling of scientists and deriding of experts, dismissal of fact as "fake news", and suicidal decisions regarding environmental issues is already putting millions of lives at risk, both within the US and worldwide.

Dorfman concludes: "We must nurse the conviction that we can use the gentle graces of science and reason to prove that the truth cannot be vanquished so easily. To those who would repudiate intelligence, we must say: you will not conquer and we will find a way to convince." He's right, of course - but at the present moment the "conviction" on which those actions should be predicated feels more like a desperate hope.