Former AG Eric Holder thinks Trump may not be very smart
More of this interview will be shown on "CBS This Morning" Friday
CBS News' Charlie Rose, in an interview Thursday night, asked former Attorney General Eric Holder whether he thinks Donald Trump isn't smart enough to be president, noting that Holder has questioned his "gray matter."
Holder was very direct in his response.
"You know, I sometimes think that [Trump] hides behind a certain bravado to hide a lack of substance that he has. A person this far along in the process, I think we would know a little more about what his plans are," he reasoned. "We'd know more about who his mentors might have been, who his intellectual guides might be. And I don't have any sense that there is any of that to him. He seems like -- he seems to me to be a very shallow man."
The former attorney general then expanded on his sense of the limitations of the Republican nominee's intellect.
"One of the other things that makes me doubt his intellectual heft is he sees everything in black and white terms, and that is -- that's the realm of people who aren't very smart, because the world really -- the tough stuff is in the gray areas," Holder told Rose. "That's where you have to delve and try to figure things out and he has shown no interest and I would say no capacity to delve in and operate in those gray areas."
In the interview, Holder also talked about the political direction of the country, telling Rose that he felt the country was moving away from its longstanding center-right political identity.
"I think that because of demographic reasons, because of the failure of some conservative policies, that we are seeing a shift between this nation -- and this nation as a whole is moving to the left."
He suggested that the country now wants more -- "in terms of its sense of government, what it wants government to do, policies that people want in place," while conservative ideas about smaller government "are being challenged, being questioned."