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So your heuristic is that we should just ignore less successful people when they criticize their more successful peers? So when some Republicans claim that Biden has dementia, we can safely ignore that because the ones making the claim are not a sitting president of the United States, but some congressmen at best?
For the career of Hanania, a political endorsement of Trump would have been a no-brainer: Trump might have offer him a job in his administration, while there is no way in hell Harris would have offered him a job. So either he was deluded into thinking that there was no way Trump could win (unlikely) or we must consider the possibility that he is driven by something other than opportunism. I think it is likely that he considered a Trump policy so bad that it would be net negative even if Trump implemented a few of his policy proposals.
Personally, I do not think that Musk turned into an idiot, and more that he turned evil or that he was always evil, but used to mask that fact through backing pro-social causes like electric cars -- that he faked being aligned to the thriving of humanity when it served his interests, and now he fakes being aligned to Trump's interests instead.
Granted, Musk backed Trump before the election (while the other tech billionaires mostly waited until Trump had won to kiss his ring), but this still does not seem an unreasonable gamble. Trump is very willing to use the federal government to harass companies which have offended him personally. The Democrats have certainly also leaned on tech companies in the past, but they might force SpaceX to hire a few more DEI, not blacklist them for government contracts because they hate Musk.
Biden was never smart or capable, his first presidential campaign crashed because he lied about being first in his class and plagiarizing. Pretty poor on 'not sounding like a fool in speeches' and 'avoiding scandals' too. Elon can sometimes sound like a fool in speeches and he is scandal-prone but there are other redeeming qualities that are lacking with Biden.
I don't know what selection mechanisms exist in the Democratic Party for leadership material but the people that gave us Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are clearly not prioritizing skills and ability.
You can be successful without being smart. Clearly I erred in tying 'smart' and 'successful' together when I was primarily talking about the allegations that Elon broke his brain. Most of the time you need to be smart to be successful.
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It's particularly jarring because the GOP is now the party whose voters have lower average income.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0
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