Why Do Intelligent People Disapprove Of Trump So Intensely?

Everyone remembers Trump's comment about how he loves the "poorly educated." He's lucky they exist; they're basically what's propping up what's left of hid favorable numbers in polling. He does worst among people who are college educated, more so among people with graduate degrees. I was watching Reliable Sources on CNN today and listening to one of Brian Stelter's guests, Brendan Nyhan, I had a bit of an epiphany. Nyhan, an academic expert on fake news, once told NBC that "It's worrisome if fake news websites further weaken the norm against false and misleading information in our politics, which unfortunately has eroded. But it's also important to put the content provided by fake news websites in perspective. People got vastly more misinformation from Donald Trump than they did from fake news websites." In 2004 he wrote All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the Media and the Truth. And he's taught this subject at Dartmouth and, more recently at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Stelter's show was about Trump as a purveyor of conspiracy theories. What Nyhan pointed out was that Trump "is in the most powerful office in the world and he's promoting conspiracy theories. They usually are used by the powerless and are directed against the powerful. But instead, he's weaponizing them from the highest office in the land."

OK, we all knew that already, right. But here's where Nyhan suddenly helped me to put 2 + 2 together and get 4. This is where I understood why educated people hate Trump so much in ways that less educated-- usually lower IQ-- people don't care much. Responding to a question from Stelter, Nyhan said "At some point it becomes an assault on our shared understanding of reality." BINGO! "An assault on our shared understanding of reality." That's is exactly what Trump is. Remember this?

Does that disgust you? If it does... you probably went to college or have an above average IQ. Back to Nyhan: "And that's what we've seen in other countries, where misinformation and conspiracy theories are weaponized by the governing regime. That's not a road we should be comfortable going down; and its not what we should pretend is normal political dishonesty. Every politician dissembles, every politician makes false statements. But this is something different entirely. It's about real peoples' lives. Those people in Puerto Rico... what happened to them is real. We sometimes act like what's on Twitter is a reality show, but Donald Trump it trying to evade accountability for something that upset the lives of thousands of our fellow citizens and maybe even is responsible for the deaths of thousands of our fellow citizens. That is deadly serious." Deadly serious and contagious. The Republican Party, in embracing Trumpism, has also embraced his methods and, basically, that whole code of his above. In their desperation to win this cycle, Republicans are just flooding the airwaves with lies pulled out of their asses-- lies about their own accomplishments and lies about their opponents. New to politics, Wisconsin's Bryan Steil has already earned himself the sobriquet "Lyin' Bryan Steils." This is a response video, "Knock It Off," from Randy Bryce's congressional campaign to the unending stream of lies from Steil and his right-wing allies: