I read the book Profiles in Ignorance.  It was tough going because it really wasn't a laugh a minute; it was a groan a second.

The followers of Trump may have felt that they elected him because he was smart.  But they elected him because he was an outsider, and they did not trust the Washington bureaucracy, which (it seemed to the rank and file of the Republican Party) was often putting in place rules and procedures that were a nuisance.  After all, Trump was often firing these big time players on his TV show, so he could do that very well.  The general belief about Trump's cleverness was from Trump's own statements.  No one in the history of the presidency claimed his own cleverness more than Trump did.

But the real attraction of DJT was his regular guy next door vocabulary, his repetitious speech, and the anti-intellectualism of trump himself.  He could not get his head around why we could not bleach viruses out of people's lungs.  Why we could not be tougher on Iran.  Why we couldn't be nicer to those Saudi princes.