The Unsettling Discovery That Some Trump Supporters Aren't Dumb

Throughout my life, no matter the slings and arrows I’ve had to suffer, there’s only one set of people I’ve hated as a group:

People who don’t look where they’re going.

People who stop, oblivious, at the top of escalators, people who linger, mindlessly, in the doorways of shops and restaurants, people who bump into you while staring at their phones and then scowl at you, you (!!), as if you materialised out of nowhere in their privately owned space.

If there were a slur for these people, I would have used it liberally over the years.

Because it doesn’t take a genius to figure that doorways are for walking through, not standing in, it’s not hard to predict what will happen if you stop at the end of a moving walkway with dozens of people behind you, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you have more accidents when your eyes aren’t pointed in the direction you’re moving.

But sadly, this particular group of people is incapable of understanding these basic, self-evident facts.

And worse they blame everyone but themselves when the consequences smack them in the face.

Over the past five months, no matter how hard I’ve tried, there’s been one group of people I’ve been unable to understand:

People who seem intelligent but still support Donald Trump.

Sure, there’s the MAGA faithful who will never stop believing that DOGE was about cutting government spending despite Trump’s “big beautiful bill” adding $2.4 trillion to the deficit ($400 billion more than the $2 trillion Musk originally claimed he would save and $2.34 trillion more than the ~$60 billion Musk actually saved).

There’s the cult of unserious people who think “the art of the deal” is starting a pointless trade war with the entire world, flip-flopping twenty-two times in two months as you realise you’re out of your depth, and then backing down quietly when it becomes obvious that the rest of the world isn’t going to fill the hole in your heart by “kissing your ass.”

There are the inevitable midwits who allowed their mutual enjoyment of anti-immigrant racism to trick them into voting against their interests.

But there are also the people who seem more than smart enough to have seen all this coming.