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from that nymag link from the prior page, this quote in that book from Katie Walsh, initial deputy chief of staff:
"He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.” "
so yeah. probably in the same way he handles business affairs, nothing is read everything is from the gut and based on his perception of the person he is talking to. and that person being below him.
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Balls. "I understand Trump and you're all ignoring his base and flattering your own prejudice".
Balls.Trump isn't a genius or a great communicator, he's just who he always was. In the past, that mostly made him a joke. It turns out that it was enough for him to win, this time in these circumstances, against a terrible communicator who has long been loathed by a significant section of the voting public. And even then, he nearly lost.
All you're doing is inventing a fictional narrative for something that wasn't at all inevitable. People tend to do that after victories (not just in politics). Same thing happened over here for Thatcher and Blair, both of whom became party leader and then prime minister by luck and then acquired mythical reputations for political mastery.
Meanwhile, Trump is cruising on reactionary autopilot. There's nothing smart about that, nor about the incompetence and ineffectiveness of his administration. If he were actually smart, the number of things he could achieve in his position are frightening. His arrival in the White House does change the game, proving that you can get away with things that most career politicians didn't think were possible. Smarter bastards than him are recalibrating their ambitious on that basis. But he isn't even smart enough to make effective use of what he won.
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His true strength has nothing to do with ideology or strategy but with his intuition and perception. He basically has the best “dog ears” of anyone since Nixon; his ability to rile up the base is uncanny. Something like the controversy over football players kneeling hardly registered to most people in America. Yet to those 20% of Americans who are Trump or Die people and to another probably 20% quietly harboring at least some racist notions as well as discontent about their own lot in life it was absolutely on the money. And sometimes he can do that for non-prejudice related things too.