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Mostly false, false, mixed, true, mixed, unfair, true.
Trump is clearly very good at getting his way and 'winning,' is demonstrably intelligent, but is operating in a new realm and so is missing a lot of the habits that people in that realm have. Lots of reports right now, for example, are talking about how the Trump team was surprised by just how many presidential appointments they would need to fill. They were probably expecting something like 20 cabinet heads, but in fact there are about 4000 roles that the president appoints for. It remains to be seen whether or not those appointments will be made on time or made well, but I'm somewhat more optimistic than journalists writing about it now (for similar reasons to why I was more optimistic than journalists about him winning the primary or the general election).
This hinges a lot on how you interpret 'thin-skinned.' The impression is that Trump will get distracted by personal slights and/or is 'unable to take a hit'; I think a fairer characterization is that Trump is the sort of person who hits back whenever hit. I think most fears based off this boil down to cultural misunderstanding--there's a worry that Trump will be the sort of person to murder critics who insult him, or go to war over diplomatic incidents, when in fact it looks like Trump will insult critics who insult him.
Trump is not a policy wonk, and this makes him seem deeply ignorant and bizarre to many policy wonks, which happens to be almost everyone with a major interest in politics. Trump is the sort of guy who will brainstorm in public to figure out people's reactions, rather than come up with a fifty point plan and then negotiate with the other guy who has a forty point plan. Trump does have lots of knowledge about the world and the state of it; it's sort of unfair to knock Trump for ignorance when he correctly calls a lot of things ahead of time in ways that policy wonks miss.
Trump is a pro wrestling fan, and many of the related correlations hold. This makes him 'boorish' in a lot of ways; he's also remarkably bad at verbal fluency compared to other national-level speakers (though he does, in fact, have the best words, to the chagrin of several critics).
Trump is a salesman and self-promoter; this puts him in a different reference class that is much more 'fraudy' than other reference classes. His approach to real estate development involved a lot of creating coordination out of nothing, which involved saying a lot of things that weren't true before they were said. (In the sense of, A will join only if B has already joined, B will join if C has already joined, C will join if A has already joined; Trump would tell all of them that 'yep, _ has already joined" and by the time things shook out this would be true, at least when it worked.) The later stage of his career involved a lot of licensing his name to someone else--you think the Trump brand is valuable, and so you pay Trump to put the Trump name on your thing. His quality standards seem to have been somewhat questionable. Trump University looks like it was mostly fraud (even if its customers liked it) and it's unclear why he thought it was a good idea to be involved. But his core businesses aren't fraudulent, and so he's not even close to someone like Madoff.
"Omnihypocritical" is unfair because it presumes that he's mostly saying final, considered policy statements instead of negotiating gambits. Trump at one point said he thought women who got abortions should be punished, not because of a deep desire for that to be true, but because he was guessing that was the right pro-life position to stake out when running for the Republican nomination. Once he learned that wasn't true, he backed off--in a way that would seem hypocritical to the sort of person who has deeply held political opinions about everything, but which doesn't at all seem that way to someone who mostly doesn't care about most issues.
Trump is obviously and deliberately a demagogue in the sense of appealing to popular desires instead of appealing to clear causal models of how those desires will be fulfilled. When asked "how will you accomplish X?" his response was generally "X will be accomplished, trust me. It's going to be great." To someone who cares deeply about evaluating plans to accomplish X, this is amazingly frustrating.
I think we have access to mostly the same information; "evidence" seems to be moving us in opposite directions or we disagree on how much to update our priors in the same direction, because I find Scott's charge of incompetence to be mostly true whereas you mostly false, regarding Trump.
Would you care to give what you believe are the best evidence for his winning-ness and intelligence? I haven't seen any anything really that compelling. Before anyone thi... (read more)