"Can IQ tests settle whether Trump is a moron or not?"

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This unkind heading appeared above a recent article concluding that, no, Trump's moronity is too elusive for IQ tests alone to capture.

This Trump era is a time of Trump-triggered crimes and evils. But as well as all the obvious, daily life and death and human misery evils, this Trump era has also brought us an accompanying, related, galaxy of absurdities and weirdnesses.

One recurring absurdity is the way in which commentators with minds 100 times more healthy and knowledge-wealthy and wise than Trump's sick and impoverished and ignorant one are, now, so demeaningly reduced to endlessly analysing Trump's thoughts and actions. Fine minds really should have finer work than this to do. It is a kind of cruel shame, as if our Mozarts and Shakespeares squandered their talents on writing jingles for gambling ads and speeches for shifty politicians.

This particular absurdity loomed especially large for me last Sunday morning. First I spent an intellectually engaging 50 minutes with an Iran war session of Private Eye magazine's Page 94 podcast panel discussion program.

This session (wittily-titled "War On Iran: Aya-Tollad You So") featured four fiendishly witty but also fiendishly bright and well-informed commentators. They wrestled with the question "Why did Trump declare his latest perfect, 'very complete', already-won war?"

Then when these worthies were done I tuned to ABC Radio National's The Minefield. There, the healthy, knowledge-wealthy and wise minds of public intellectuals Scott Stephens, Waleed Aly and scholarly international law guru Dr Tamer Morris addressed the theme "Can illegal wars........

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