The Supreme Court did specifically decode the election instead of a recount, so this did call Bush's legitimacy into serious question at the time.

Source: am old

The media reporting on this was carefully vague, but all full recount of all Florida votes would be a narrow victory for Gore.

Gore didn't sue for a full recount, so his legal strategy was not a winning one, so most reporting focussed on Gore strategy and not on the end vote tally.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/

On some level, you can’t learn anything if you aren’t readily willing to admit ignorance. To the extent that narcissism prevents a person from admitting that…

A bunch of wealthy Republicans disrupted the recount and the Supreme Court declared Bush president (by stopping all unfinished recounts).

Several months later an audit showed that he lost.

Because he is a crook!

Part of the problem is a culture of people who know things and use their greater knowledge to humiliate those who know less. I encounter this in job interviews all the time.

I *never* do this to other people, it's evil. But when you are being attacked, the instinct is to hate the people who know more.

"You don't even know how -- works."
"That's right, I *don't* know how -- works. Will you explain it to me?"

When I discovered that this kind of person who I was so scared of finding out what I didn't know so often could NOT explain the topic themselves. Oooh. All of those worries vanished.

And if they can explain it? Well, now I know too. I win... or I win.

Wish I could have learned this at a younger age.

Now, I just say "I don't understand" as soon as I'm at all confused and I can learn things much faster. The kind of people I want to be respected by aren't phased by this, and the kind of people I used to worry about impressing were never going to be impressed by me no matter what I did. So it's much faster if I just ask questions when I have them and admit what I don't know.

Saves time.

I like to think that I'm in the same place but in growing up I had to get over a bit of self-consciousness and imposter syndrome driven anxieties. When encountering new people I wanted to bury them with expertise because I was scared someone would ask me to leave or decide I didn't belong. So I didn't like to admit when I didn't understand something. I'd try to play along then go home and study in secret.

He's not quite mentally ill with an IQ below 80... He's probably somewhere below the avg though.

But he is a complete sociopath, a narcissist who lacks all empathy and has no ability to comprehend and understand things. Everything is about him, if you don;t worship the ground he walks on, you're the enemy.

He also blindly believes what he's told... or at least what he was told by the last person he spoke too.

So he spouts whatever yes man bullshit he's given in the briefing before he speaks to the media... and will embellish it with his self aggrandising flavour of bullshit because he thinks he's the centre of the universe.. and is incapable of understanding that the majority of the world sees through his bullshit and sees him for the ignorant, pathetic, pedo that he is.

Exactly that.
Intelligence is not smartness¹.
Being smart is a quality that comes from your upbringing or natural factors.
Intelligence is the political choice to be intellectually humble. That is open to everyone.

¹in French "l'intelligence n'est pas la rapidité d'esprit", not sure whether smartness entirely works as a translation but I don't have a better one

This is true.

I wish we could blame it all on the contempt and elitism of people of "educated classes" -- I think about my grandmother often she would say things like that. She had a 6th grade education. All her kids went to college because she made them, and then grand kids too.

But she also thought we were full of ourselves and pretentious. And she knew things, understood things I never will.

Which is why they can get so far down a wrong path. No course correction.

For them "Intelligence" isn't something that you do, for these people it's something that you *are*

But this is false. To be intelligent you simply need to be open to learning new things every day. Willing to grow. That's it.