If there was a game show like are you smarter than a fifth grader, but instead it is are you smarter than previous President George Bush Jr. and twice impeached previous President Trump is the first contestant would Trump win? So basically who is smarter the 43rd or 45th?
I tend to favour Hanlon’s Razor. It makes much more sense that this dumbass old rich guy stumbled his way into the whitehouse by saying just the right combination of old rich guy nonsense that got American conservatives excited. Tons of powerful people took advantage of him for tons of different reasons. It’s why he was never consistent on anything. He’d be pro- something and then meet with someone in a backroom and suddenly be anti- that thing. His cabinet was full of Dick Cheneys.
If you look at Trump through the lens of “dumb spoiled rich guy who didn’t really want the job anymore as soon as he realized how much work it actually was”, everything he does makes perfect sense. He was a useful idiot for the wealthy elites to do their regulatory capture. Basically Reagan all over again. They even used the same campaign slogan.
I had to google Hanlon’s razor. For Trump I’ll go with a combo of malice (revenge) and stupidity. For the rest it’s greed and narcissism. From wiki- Douglas W. Hubbard quoted Hanlon’s razor and added “a clumsier but more accurate corollary …: ‘Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system.’”