“Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that ‘nobody’ showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” he added. “If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’”
[…]
“This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about,” he said of Trump’s campaign falsehoods. “This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.”
True. I’d qualify him as more manipulative than intelligent though, but I guess you can be smart at being manipulative. I’m not sure he’s even that because he’s just been afforded every opportunity in his life to take the most advantage of being manipulative so if he was not a millionaire by birth, I don’t think he would be anywhere near as good at it.
He’s good at subconsciously transmitting divisive/extremist messages with such “genuine innocence/ignorance” (not sure about this word, but he seems to be genuinely unaware of when he is lying) that other susceptible people absorb subconsciously too. It does not go through the rational part of the brain, so this is not about being stupid, being stupid probably helps him be genuine when he makes the most blatant lies, unlike JD.