Is Donald Trump All That Dumb?

So, Trump shows up at a meeting of the real business bigwigs at a quarterly conclave of the Business Roundtable and manages to make a complete fool out of himself in front of Jamie Dimon from J.P. Morgan, Apple’s Tim Cook, the heads of Citigroup and Bank of America among others, by telling them that he plans to eliminate income taxes on income earned from tips given to service people at restaurants, hotels and casinos.

Trump got a big round of cheers when he made this statement to the crowd at his Las Vegas rally last week which simply reflected the fact that most of the Vegas residents who work for a living (Vegas is also a favorite retirement town) happen to be service workers who work mostly for tips.

At the Business Roundtable, on the other hand, most of the listeners ignored the comment and a few of them laughed. And their laughter wasn’t provoked by Trump saying something funny — it was the way a business guy would react to anything that stupid said to his face.

What these titans of American enterprise don’t understand however, is that what makes Donald Trump so unique and so powerful in the public arena is precisely the fact that he not only goes against every traditional form of acceptable business communication, but actually seems to relish saying things which nobody else is willing or able to say.