We must face reality. Trump is not a stupid man. Far from it.

[appmanga]

18. Of course a stupid man could have done this...

...because a stupid man has.

Trump has done what he's spent a lifetime doing: being so utterly audacious, people who rely on logic, rules, order, and propriety have stood no chance against him because they operate within those frameworks. A person who has no constraints when it come to their behavior, who's bereft of concern or shame, is even more perplexing than the Kamikaze or the suicide bomber. "Grab 'em by the pussy" or a rape in broad daylight in the public venue of a department store is so far to the outer end of effrontery it makes sense his victims wouldn't immediately know how to react because such things are so far afield of conventional behavior.

Trump isn't just a tax cheat, he may well be the most prolific tax cheat in modern American history, lying without reservation about facts easily proved by the most rudimentary investigation, and yet he got away with it for years. The outrageous lies like Mika Brezinski bleeding from a post-surgery bandaged face, or seeing Arab-Americans cheer the destruction on 9/11 are without parallel from any other public figure. The outrageous insistence in public that COVID was no more serious than the flu while acknowledging its danger privately to Bob Woodward because of what he'd been told by the medical professionals around him; but couple that with the ostentatiously ignorant musings about injecting bleach and inserting UV light into body cavities while those same professionals cowed within in his eyesight, despite knowing what they were hearing was pretty damned batshit crazy. Trump, as usual, went unchallenged by authorities equipped to do so.

I respect your credentials and your expertise, but I know a moron when I see one. This is no evil genius, but it's also no garden variety sociopath. What Trump has is spades is the quality common to history's most well known, most dangerous, and most vicious dictators: naked, unbridled, unchecked, audacity.

And he has yet to be stopped.