Or is it something worse?

Some believe he is that stupid. That he's literally the "low IQ" person he says those who intelligently question his stupid actions must be. Tucker Carlson is one such target. He was accused by Trump of being "Low IQ" for expressing bewildered outrage that Trump would issue an almost unintelligible, profanity-laced screed threatening mass murder on Easter, a holiday of some importance to the Christians who generally support Trump. It seemed like a very Low IQ thing to do since it served only to alienate his increasingly uncomfortable supporters – including Tucker, who has a huge audience. Has Trump never heard that line about not defecating where you eat?

Apparently not.

The Jesus Trump thing came soon afterward. It has – predictably – alarmed Christians, who generally do not support what they consider to be idolatry. Yet Trump decided to put out an image of himself dressed in the robes of Jesus, applying his holy healing hand to a wounded soldier with one hand while holding divine light in the other. It was both very weird and very stupid – at least on the face of it.

Why? Does the president really have nothing better to do than publish these gratuitously stupid images that he has to know will be perceived as insulting and deranged by his supporters? Never mind the ammo it gives to those who never supported him. Why is Trump doing that? Isn't helping your enemy when you didn't have to a good working definition of stupid?

It is possible he's exactly that.

Trump's intelligence is more like a combination of effrontery and cunning. He does things more intelligent people refrain from doing because intelligent people shy away from the sort of hyena-snatching-a-piece-of-meat thing that Trump excels at doing. They respect rules because they understand that, in the end, if there are no rules then everyone loses. Of course, a sociopath is blind to this reality, which is another working tautology for stupid. Screwing everyone over works for awhile. Even a long while. But – inevitably – it stops working.

Trump may be so sociopathically stupid that he cannot restrain himself from revealing his contempt for his own supporters. Even Ted Bundy – a sociopath and a psychopath – had the smarts to at least pretend that he wasn't a serial killer. To show a handsome face to the jury.

Maybe Trump is losing his mind. That could account for the stupid things he's been doing lately. He is almost 80. As old as Joe Biden was three years ago, when signs of dementia began to manifest. One of the signs of dementia is erratic behavior and strange – often untoward – utterances as the mind begins to lose its former ability to meter thought and refrain from saying things out loud that the mind used to know were not to be said out loud.

This happens. It is always sad when it happens. But it is tragic when it happens to a man in Trump's position because the consequences involve the fate of hundreds of millions of other people. Grand-dad saying weird things at the table is just a family thing that is kept within the family. When the president of the United States says weird things, publicly, it is an alarming matter.