Chris Abraham

Carter: estimated IQ around 145. Nuclear physics at Annapolis, one of the sharpest technical minds ever to occupy the Oval Office. Clinton: around 155—Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Yale Law, a political mind so quick it bordered on unfair. Obama: around 130, President of the Harvard Law Review, the most credentialed editorial job in American legal academia.

Trump: approximately 101.

Dead average. Textbook normie. The kind of IQ score that gets you through life without anyone calling you gifted.

I had my IQ tested in the high 130s. I grew up in Honolulu at St. Louis School—ILH, not Punahou, so I carry that particular chip knowing Obama walked those manicured grounds across the island while we were busy proving something from Kaimuki. I know what the high-IQ credentialed world looks like from the inside. I know how much we quietly rely on those numbers to tell us who matters.

And then there’s Trump at 101, and I have to just sit with that for a second.

Because in 79 years, a dead-average American—no photographic memory, no Rhodes Scholarship, no law review—cut a swatch through world history that none of the geniuses managed. Two presidential wins. Reshaped both political parties. Survived legal, media, and institutional onslaughts that would have vaporized anyone without his particular brand of teflon. Became the most polarizing and consequential figure of his era.

A 101 IQ didn’t hold him back. It might have been load-bearing. He was legible to normal people because he essentially is one—he thinks at the speed of a bumper sticker, which turns out to be exactly the speed most people actually process politics.

The genius presidents had their moments. But none of them pulled off what the normie did. If the IQ estimates are even roughly right, that’s not an insult to Trump—it’s the most democratic, most American story in the history of the presidency. You don’t need to be exceptional to be historic. You just need to want it more than everyone else in the room, and refuse to stop.

The elephant identifier wins again.

I never think about wasting electricity. Lights on all night, AC running all day, every device in the apartment doing its thing—it doesn’t register as a real cost the way food or rent does. That’s an American relationship with electricity and I didn’t know it was specific to America until I lived somewhere else.

In England first, then Germany, the relationship was completely different. In Germany especially, leaving a light on when you left the house wasn’t just wasteful—it was a social misdemeanor. Neighbors would see the light, assume you were home, and knock. The light being on was an invitation. It meant someone was there. So you turned everything off when you left not just to save money but to avoid the social consequence of implying you were available when you weren’t.

And the bill itself was punishing in a way that shaped behavior at a cellular level. This was around 2008 and German residential electricity was already expensive enough that you thought about it the way Americans in the 1950s thought about the phone bill or the heating oil—it was a real number that required real management. One light left on all night was noticeable. Leaving the AC running in an empty apartment was almost unthinkable.

I don’t know if it’s still like that. London felt different—maybe wealth smooths it out, maybe the culture shifted. But Germany felt like a place that had never forgotten that energy costs something. America forgot that somewhere around the time central air became standard and never remembered it again. Is it still like that over there?