Rasmussenreports:

For Being Such An Idiot, Trump Is Pretty Smart
By Brian Joondeph

Thursday, July 25, 2019

We have been hearing now for four years, ever since that escalator ride at Trump Tower, how then-candidate, now President Trump is such an idiot. The media, Democrats and NeverTrumpers virtually in lockstep assured us that Trump would never be the Republican nominee. When he was, they doubled down promising that he would never be president. Nearly every so-called opinion poll confirmed their predictions.

Who turned out to be smart, winning the White House, and who turned out to be the buffoons? They still couldn’t admit that they were wrong, predicting that Trump would be impeached or that he would resign from office under intense pressure from critics and scandal. From Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti to Robert Mueller and Megan Rapinoe, each one was portrayed as the dragonslayer ready to bring down Trump.

All have come and gone like the seasons, bringing down nothing but their reputations and what little integrity they might have possessed. Yet Trump haters won’t give up. Trump is still too stupid and incompetent to be president, they tell us. He is an embarrassment to the country and the world.

Yet on Friday, July 19, Trump sits at 50 percent total approval in the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, six points higher than his predecessor, Mr. Perfect, exactly eight years ago. These approval numbers are despite what many have described as a bad week for the president with his “unforced error” of going after the four lovely patriots of the “Jihad Squad” and telling them that if America is so bad, they are welcome to “go back” to somewhere, anywhere, that is more to their liking.

Brit Hume, godfather of the Republican DC establishment, not a NeverTrumper, but more of a SometimesTrumper, said Trump’s tweets were “politically stupid.” When Rush Limbaugh and others suggested that Trump’s tweets were strategic and calculated rather than stupid, Hume dismissed this immediately, “I think that's too smart by half, too clever by half. Trump couldn't put something like this together, are you kidding me?”

Of course, Trump couldn’t put something like this together. He isn’t clever enough. Yet he was smart enough to defeat 17 competent and experienced contenders for the Republican nomination in 2016 despite having never run for political office. He is still president after two-and-a-half years of nonstop negative media coverage and criticism from Democrats and many Republicans.