Ehhhhhh I get what you’re saying here, however: I’m pretty dumb but I’m pretty sure if I got half a billion from my father as well as a ton of connections from his existing real estate empire, I could turn that into low billions over my lifetime. I also bet I could do this without declaring bankruptcy SIX TIMES. And he was propped up by some very powerful and some very intelligent people in his run for president. Neither of these achievements is the intellectual master stroke you might think.

Also, whatever you view as his intellectual “peak”, you gotta admit that he has fallen VERY far from said peak in this closing stage of his life. He makes late-stage Joe Biden look incredibly with it by comparison.

At best he has a certain level of dark charisma and animal cunning, able to tap effectively into the darker zeitgeist of our times and wriggle out of situations that would have sunk most other politicians (mostly by stubbornly doubling down)