“Stupid is as stupid does.”—from the movie Forrest Gump, 1994

Charlie Munger, who along with his fellow Omaha, Nebraska native Warren Buffet built Berkshire Hathaway into a multibillion-dollar enterprise, was often asked about the secret of their success.  One question was particularly interesting.

“Are you and Warren just smarter than everybody else?”

“No,” Charlie replied.  “We aren’t smarter than everybody.  We’re just less stupid.”

Those words echo what Mama Gump taught young Forrest (hopefully you’ve all had a chance to see the movie by now).

Forrest wasn’t a bright kid.  Sometimes people called him stupid.  His Mother taught him how to respond to such an insult.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Mama Gump wanted Forrest to understand it wasn’t how much you know, how “smart” you are, that matters.  It’s not how high you score on a test.  It’s the things you do that make you stupid.

God, could the president ever use a big dose of Mama Gump right now.

Since taking office, trump has done plenty of things that could be considered spiteful, corrupt, heartless, and maybe even downright evil. Sending children with cancer off to countries where they’ve never lived.  Spending tax dollars to accept white South Africans, while sending Afhgans who fought beside us back to be killed.  Pardoning fraudsters, thieves, corrupt politicians, gang leaders, and even those who assaulted police officers, if it’s politically (or financially) expedient.  Aiding and abetting the most massive armed invasion since World War II, because he “believes” the invader.  Promoting the idea of building condos over the graves of children.  Cutting staff at Veterans’ Hospitals.  Suddenly and without warning cutting off aid that has led to starvation, disease, and death throughout the world (a Boston University researcher estimates this has already led to the deaths of over 300,00 children).  Hawking everything from cryptocurrency to Teslas, like a slick snake oil salesman.

And that’s just getting started.  I could go on and on.  And each of you could add plenty more.  But today I want to talk about something else.

The things that Mama Gump and Forrest would call stupid. 

THE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL (BBB)–OR THE BIG STUPID BILL (BSB).  From massively increasing the deficit to denying Americans health care to shifting even more wealth from the middle class to the rich, this bill might just be the biggest smoke and mirrors exercise in Washington history.  Medicaid is viciously cut on the premise that having a work requirement will magically reduce costs.

Of course it makes no sense.  And historically, there’s no evidence either.  States that have established work requirements have seen no reduction in costs and no increase in employment.  Most everyone who’s on Medicaid and able to work is trying to do so.  All that these state efforts have done is make the process of signing up and getting benefits more difficult and complicated, for both parents and their children. Consequently, more coverage is lost.  And more people suffer.

Look, I practiced medicine for over 40 years.  I saw people from all walks of life.  Some had great employment, others had lousy jobs.  But I never saw anyone who basically wanted to sit on a couch in front of a TV all day stuffing potato chips in their mouths.  But that’s the imagine MAGA wants you to believe.

As I’ve said many times before, anyone who wants to “fix” Medicaid without fixing our entire failing health care system is wasting their time.  And our money.

The Big Stupid Bill (BSB) will skyrocket the deficit, harm rural and safety-net hospitals and nursing homes that depend on Medicaid, trigger legislative cuts in Medicare, increase the number of uninsured, and perhaps worst of all, widen the gap between the rich and poor, which threatens our homeland security far more than any batch of immigrants.

THE STUPID WAR ON SCIENCE EDUCATION.  Slashing research for purely political reasons will bite this country in ways we can’t even imagine (I’ve already written about this).  Attacking education, threatening students, and withholding research funding is simply a political knife in the back of our country’s future.

Where once we were a leader, we’re now not even in the game.  In the past, America trained and influenced scientists and leaders who improved the lives of millions, both here and abroad. 

But quit the World Health Organization, deny the effectiveness of vaccines, quit the Paris Climate accords, deny the reality of climate change, kick out non-American scientists and students?  Someday there will be those who ask, “why did the world turn its back on America?”  The answer, of course, will be that the world didn’t.  It was America who turned its back on the world.

THE PHONEY MAHA MOVEMENT.  You don’t have to have a PhD in microbiology to know that swimming in sewage can make you sick.  You don’t have to have a degree in immunology to understand that vaccines have saved the lives of millions. You don’t have to be a virologist to know that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus.  You don’t have to be a genius to know that research is important to new discoveries that will keep us safer in the future, and that these findings should be shared in an honest, transparent fashion.

But apparently rfk, jr. somehow didn’t get the memo. In addition to cutting funding, spreading wild theories and inaccurate information, and threatening medical journals that publish articles that don’t meet his personal approval, junior also feels qualified to make medical recommendations.

Researchers have been fired recklessly for seemingly no reason.  Important discoveries have ground to a halt.  HIV studies have been halted.  Monitoring diseases no longer happens.  Think none of this affects you?  Check your health by this time next year.

The most recent decision to not recommend the COVID vaccine to otherwise healthy mothers and babies was made without the input from the doctors who usually recommend such changes.  So much for the guy who says, “don’t take medical advice from me” and then proceeds to give you medical advice.

The rollout of the official MAHA policy has also been marred by the fact that some of the references supporting the program don’t even exist.  That’s right.  They appear to be simply made up.

Axing pollution standards will do us far more harm than any benefit gained from banning a few food dyes.  Supporting nutritional programs (which the Big Stupid Bill cuts) would do far more to make America healthy than promoting beef tallow over canola oil. 

Really serious about this stuff?  Then attack it at its source.  Make healthy food available, cut subsidies for high fructose corn syrup (which would hit Nebraska farmers hard), increase taxes on junk food, maybe even treat fast food entities like tobacco companies.

It would all be a step too far for many, but it would be a much more honest approach than what currently is being sold to us as “MAHA.”

THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY “DOGE”–OR THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT STUPIDITY “DOGS” Common sense should be enough to tell you that turning loose a ketamine, Adderall, psylocibin, and Ecstasy-addled narcissistic billionaire and a group of his twenty-something so-called geniuses with no real-world experience beyond a keyboard and video games, giving them unparallelled access to private information, and then expecting them to somehow make the government more efficient would be a really stupid idea.  But there you have it.

The DOGS fiasco was supposed to save trillions.  At last count, that claim had dropped to around a hundred billion, but most analysts say it’s actually much less.  More importantly, when you factor in lost services, firing and rehiring and firing again and then hiring replacements that need further training, along with the lost productivity that goes with the “Hey, this is Elon!  Stop what you’re doing right now and send me a list of 5 things you did last week, or you’re fired” memos, DOGS saved nothing, but rather added to the budget deficit.

A surgeon who uses a chainsaw instead of a scalpel isn’t going to be more efficient, nor will he do you any favors.  But that’s what dr. musk has brought you.

By now Elon has slinked off to Texas, where I’m sure he’ll be busy building rockets that blow up and cars that no one seems to want.  But in the meantime, we are left with a government that is no more efficient, far less effective, and actually more costly.

THE STUPIDITY OF STARVING REVENUE If you owned a business that was losing money, would your knee-jerk solution be to get rid of your billing department?  Hopefully you’d recognize that that would be a really stupid way to try to save money.

But that’s exactly the approach of this administration.

Despite a tax structure already rigged in favor of the very rich, and evidence of large-scale tax avoidance (remember when trump bragged about it himself?) if not downright criminality, Washington seems intent on shooting itself in the foot when it comes to revenue.  Cutting the IRS budget will ensure more corruption and fewer services to honest Americans who are trying to do the right thing by paying their taxes to support our military and other programs.  It will also worsen a deficit that has brought about a lowering of our credit rating and threatens worsening inflation. 

But that’s less important than who gets to own a bigger yacht.  Or build a new golf course.

THE STUPIDITY OF A TRADE WAR WHERE EVERYONE LOSES So much has been written about the sheer lunacy of the arbitrary, poorly conceived, ever changing trump tariffs that there’s not much point in talking about it.  Threaten tariffs, back off, then do it again, then talk about deals that never happen, all the while sending the stock market on a roller coaster ride.  It’s occurring so often that some investors have even given it a name.

TACO, short for trump Always Chickens Out.

Whether trump follows through with any of this is unknown, but let’s be clear.  For every job (if any) that’s created, there will be others that will be lost.  Trust in America will evaporate (it’s happening already), and the American taxpayer will pay for every penny.  If this were happening under a Democratic president, the Republicans would be screaming that this is basically an added tax.

And they’d be absolutely right.

I have to use the same analogy I used in my last post.  A trade war is like two people taking turns bashing one another over the head with a sledgehammer.  One may finally “win,” but in terms of damage, both of them come out huge losers.

THE STUPIDITY OF REJECTING THE IMPORTANCE OF SOFT POWER Since World War II, America has become unquestionably the strongest nation in the world (although that’s now in severe jeopardy).  But only a small part of it has been due to our military might.  Engaging other countries, fostering economic growth, building relationships, living our values, aiding countries in need, standing up to dictators—these have made America great.  Now, of course, in a transactionally driven administration, none of that matters.  Get rid of foreign students, disengage from any country not run by wealthy despots with throwaway 747s, and put a price on every human transaction seems to be the order of the day.

No matter how strong our military, we can’t fight our way out of this hole.  And increasing isolationism makes it likely that we won’t.

Of course, there’s a lot more than just this.  Our sell-out of our allies and catering to dictators.  And I haven’t even touched on immigration, which is an emotional flashpoint that desperately needs rational discussion.  More on that another time.

In the meantime, consider one more thing about Mama Gump.  Remember why she gave her son the name Forrest?  It was to remind him that (as best I can remember the movie) “sometimes even smart people can do things that don’t make no sense.”

Forrest was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most disturbing figures in American history.

According to the historian Shelby Foote, the Civil War produced only two people who could be considered true geniuses.  One was Abraham Lincoln.

The other, Foote said, was Nathan Bedford Forrest.  He was the only person to enter the confederate army as a private and come out as a general.  His cavalry tactics have been described as brilliant.

He was also a vicious racist.

Prior to the war, he’d made himself into a millionaire in the slave trade.  He would later say this about the southern cause: “if we ain’t fightin’ this war to preserve slavery, then what the hell are we fightin’ it for?”  On the battlefield, he took captured white soldiers as prisoners and massacred the black ones.

And after the war, he helped start an organization that sadly lives to this day.  The Ku Klux Klan.

Despite this (or maybe because of it), Forrest had his name honored throughout the south well into the twentieth century.  It’s likely that the fictional Alabama town where the Gumps lived had a statue of Forrest somewhere.  Plenty of southern towns did.  It wasn’t until decades later that his legacy was confronted.

Which brings us back to today.  The trump administration is full of “smart” people.  They’ve graduated from all of those same fancy universities that trump now hates, and have all the connections those degrees can buy.  They’re smart enough to come up with all sorts of rationalizations for whatever they want to do.

But that hasn’t kept them from doing incredibly stupid things.  And we’ll all pay the price for this.  Especially the poorest among us. And especially our children and grandchildren.

Stupid is as stupid does.  And I’m afraid in the coming months we’re going to see just how much the wisdom of Mama Gump still holds true.