J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon just threw himself into the ranks of fallen-halo business leaders alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, George Soros, Howie Schultz, and the rest of the sorry lot by opening his big mouth and treating us to some utterly stupid opinions about President Trump.

Get a barf bag handy, because here's the CNBC report:

"I think I could beat Trump," Dimon said Wednesday during an event held at his bank's Park Avenue headquarters in New York.  "Because I'm as tough as he is, I'm smarter than he is.  I would be fine.  He could punch me all he wants, it wouldn't work with me.  I'd fight right back."

Shortly after, Dimon addressed the uproar caused by his comments: "I should not have said it.  I'm not running for president," the CEO said about an hour after the original exchange.  The off-the-cuff outburst "proves I wouldn't make a good politician," Dimon said.  "I get frustrated because I want all sides to come together to help solve big problems."

He's a tough guy, but he backs down by the time he gets around to his next idea?  And he's smarter than Trump?

Up until now, I had actually rather liked Dimon.  But with this kind of talk, all we can conclude is that big business leaders, including Dimon, are now trying to rival Hollywood in the number of foolish, ignorant, leftist things coming out.

There's just so much to unpack here.

So he can beat Trump because he's smarter than Trump, but he can't beat a Democrat?  Because...Democrats are smarter still?  What kind of idiocy is this?

This kind of view is actually common among the business elites.  Chris Cillizza of all people, wrote a spot-on analysis of the whole thing, worthy of the great Tom Wolfe, here:

Among that elite business set – of which Dimon is quite clearly a leading member – the sense is that Trump was always a sort of amusing caricature, a wealthy and successful guy for sure, but someone who was more showhorse than workhorse.  That group looked down its nose at Trump as sort of a carnival barker, putting his name on buildings and turning himself into a pop-culture figure.  To them, he was 85% reality TV star, 15% businessman.

And then Trump went and got himself elected.  (A massive part of Trump's motivation to run for president was, of course, to prove these business and political elites wrong – to show them all how wrong they were about him.)

Ah, a status thing.  And this would be important, because Dimon is status-obsessed as a member of the business elite.  He hasn't a clue what ordinary Americans are thinking, and what's more, he doesn't even know that he doesn't know.

For me, it's just stupid because the older and more experienced you get, the less you live in a bubble and the less you adhere to old certainties.  When I was young and all I knew was the bond market as a fresh-out-of-J-school reporter, I didn't have a high opinion of stock geniuses or real estate tycoons or any other branch of the private sector.  Bonds were best, because they were all I knew.  When I went to work for Forbes, I acquired a healthy respect for business tycoons – very different from bond people, but no less significant or admirable.  When I went to Investor's Business Daily in 2002, I acquired a healthy respect for stock markets and those who understood them.  There are different kinds of business talents and expertise and personalities, just as surely as there are different kinds of businesses.  Yes, for a while there, I thought real estate was for the slightly kooky and eccentric, based on random meetings with New York's real estate mavens (I never met Trump, only some of his rivals), but as I got older and more knowledgeable, I recognized that that was nonsense.  Surely, at Dimon's age, he would have some sort of inkling of this.  But he doesn't.  He has no willingness or even the awareness to recognize that President Trump has a particular kind of smarts – not academic, not business-school smooth, but an intelligence so different from what Dimon has that Dimon doesn't even recognize it.

I've been around billionaires.  I know what they are like.  I read the Crazy Rich Asians book just to fact-check it.  Dimon belittles Trump for inheriting a small fortune, but the reality is, most people who inherit small fortunes blow them and then drift back down to middle classes.  Billionaires are the small group of people who take small fortunes and make big fortunes, which is what Trump did.  Very, very rarely do you see any of them who didn't start out with a small fortune at the beginning.  The hard work, detail orientation, and capacity to see which way the trends are going are all part of why some people end up billionaires.

Besides being quite successful in real estate (the first hundred million is always the hardest), Trump's even more successful in politics, and he's accomplished the impossible with it: getting elected in the biggest black swan anomaly in U.S. history, based on Trump's uncanny capacity to recognize and validate what ordinary people are thinking.

Dimon, by contrast, has none of that talent.  His only canniness is in knowing that Democrats can be bought off.  That's why he's the guy who got himself in the middle of the 2009 financial meltdown, became associated with that in the minds of ordinary Americans, yet somehow didn't get scathed by it (perhaps his large donations to Democrats at the time helped).  He is exactly what Americans don't like about either business or politics – their mergers and acquisitions of one other. 

And this guy thinks it's an easy matter to become president?  He didn't even think of it first!  Part of Trump's success is being first on the case, something Dimon missed as his bank engaged in bad security-buying, leading to the mortgage meltdown.

Then he brings up the nonsense about wanting people to work together.  As if he hasn't noticed which party's obstructing the border wall, or spending all its time yelling "Russian collusion" and calling for impeachment.  Let's just say that's not Trump's show.  Unity?  Bringing people together?  We heard that one from President Obama, circa 2009.  Not the economic good times, Jame-o.

He hasn't the slightest self-awareness here, yet he thinks because he's smart, he must be smarter than Trump.  This is just what people don't like.

Beat it, Jamie.  You've broken enough things out there, so go retreat back into your money.

Image credit: World Economic Forum via Flickr, Wikicommons, CC BY-SA 2.0.