banning Harvard from enrolling international students is a pretty clear signal to elite intellectual capital that the US is no longer the obvious place to study. Trump 2.0 is fascinating social experiment - can reducing aggregate brainpower lead to better outcomes for the country? Not a rhetorical question, being smart is not the only way to win
That's obvious: the brain is the most energy-intensive organ in the body, so shutting down the brain leads to significant energy savings. The energy saved this way can then be spent on drilling for more oil, and the oil can be burned to power AI datacenters where the real thinking is done.
being smarter doesn't always lead to better decision making - many people overly intellectualise a problem and fail to move to action. Trump is definitely action oriented, a lot of it really dumb, but it does alter the external conditions which may produce better outcomes.
China doesn't have a leadership problem atm, though certainly has had its fair share of anti-intellectual leaders. Trump's actions are very familiar to Chinese people, especially ones who have been educated on the excesses of Maoism.
That said, point of post is - will Trump anti-intellectualism 'work', where work = benefiting America. Ostensibly, the answer looks like 'of course not' but in my view, it is too early to say
Putting aside the negatives, I see zero upsides of reducing brain power. The people being more equal perhaps? Maybe the path to the fabled middle class is to bring down the upper class.
These days, a lot of brainpower is spent on scamming people (case in point: Vivek Ramaswamy). One can really make quite a good living off of scamming people these days. If you could reduce the brainpower of that demographic, I think this would be good for everyone else.
