Trump is one of the most misunderstood figures in political history. The Left dismisses him as dumb, but he is not dumb. The Left only recognizes intelligence as book smarts, and indeed Trump is not book smart. But intelligence also encompasses street smarts, and Trump is a genius in that domain—probably the most street-smart president in modern history. Ideally you would like to have both book smarts and street smarts. (JD Vance seems to have both.) But if you only have book smarts without the street smarts, then you're not going to be very successful in the world of politics.
The other thing the Left (and TDS “Right”) foolishly criticize Trump about is the fact that he had no political experience prior to taking office. He was the first president to have neither political nor military experience. Military experience may be beneficial to success, but political experience is mostly a detriment. The longer time spent in the swamp, the more corrupt you become.
The original case for Trump was: he’s a successful businessman, and he could run the country like a business. But that was not entirely correct. Maybe you could say that about Elon Musk, but Trump was not the CEO of a large-scale corporation like Elon. Trump is, first and foremost, a self-promoter and deal-maker. Those are his two greatest skills that led to all his success in real estate and television. He's great at branding himself and making deals—which just so happen to be the two most valuable skills for a modern politician.
In modern politics, you need the branding, showmanship, and media skills that Trump had from the television world in order to run a successful campaign and get elected. Once elected, you need to be an expert deal-maker to negotiate with various world leaders and the elites within your own country.
Trump is criticized for not being an expert in any specific aspect of politics, be it foreign policy, constitutional law, the economy, and dozens of other sub-domains a president must deal with. But of course no single president can be an expert in all those fields. The president needs to assemble a team of top experts in each of those fields, so then he can use them as advisers to figure out what the country should do. But knowing what you want to do is only one step. Actually doing it requires making deals with other countries, their leaders, Congress, and other business leaders. Therefore, what you really need in a president is an expert deal-maker. And Trump literally wrote a book on that.
Trump has talked a lot about how other countries have been taking advantage of the US in various deals, which is true. So you need an expert deal-maker to get in there and renegotiate better deals for the country. And that's exactly what Trump is doing. The only reason Trump was not fully successful in his first term was because he did not assemble a team of great advisers. That is partially his fault, but to be fair, he had the entire deep state working against him. It took time to properly recognize friend from enemy, which he has hopefully now done in his second term.
I myself dismissed Trump at first and didn’t think he was a serious political figure. It took me several years to recognize how valuable his particular set of skills are in media, marketing, branding, deal-making, and negotiation. Those are all the key skills required to get elected as president and to be a successful leader once in office. All those skills are more associated with street smarts than book smarts. They require being effective at talking to people, whether to mass crowds in campaign rallies, or one-on-one in diplomatic meetings.
I long ago realized that campaigning was a skill that favored one type of person, which was a completely different set of skills than it took to be a successful politician once in office. So few people have both those skills, which is why the country has been run so poorly. I never would have imagined that Trump would be that special person to possess all the skills required of a modern president, but apparently he is that man. If successful, he will lay the blueprint for other politicians to follow in the future.