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in april 1995 a man called macarthur wheeler walked into a bank in pittsburgh pennsylvania and robbed it at gunpoint on his way into the building he smiled at the cctv camera and on his way out he smiled at it again some hours later macarthur went to another bank and did exactly the same thing he smiled at the cctv camera went up to the cashier pointed a gun at them got some money and walked out again some hours later there was a knock at macarthur's door and he was stunned to see the police standing there his image had been put out on the nightly news and he'd been recognized and somebody called the cops but i wore lemon juice macarthur shouted as he was led away you see macarthur wheeler had come to believe that because lemon juice made writing invisible it had rendered his face invisible to the cctv doctors experts examined mcarthur to see what was wrong was he unwell was he on something no they concluded that macarthur wheeler was just incredibly stupid but worse than that his extreme stupidity was linked to an overarching belief in his intellectual superiority to other people a year later a social psychologist called david dunning was reading about macarthur wheeler's case and took the story which he and a fellow psychologist justin kruger used as the basis for what became known as the dunning-kruger effect the dunning-kruger effect happens when somebody with little or no ability believes they are highly able at something so for example in the case of the bank robbery macarthur wheeler imagined that he was a brilliant bank robbing mastermind when in fact he was just an idiot the first rule of the dunning-kruger effect is that you don't know you have the dunning-kruger effect some people might for example think that they are a brilliant singer when in fact they sound like a cockatoo in a grinder other people might think they're great lovers when actually they're not donald trump is the dunning-kruger effect in motion the last questions are much more difficult like a memory question it's like you'll go person woman man camera tv donald trump thinks he's a very smart guy he thinks probably that he's the smartest guy in america if not the world and yet almost everything he has said and done in the last four years and stretching beyond it demonstrates the opposite this is a man who thinks that there were airfields during the american war of independence in the 1770s a full 140 years before people flew this is a man who believes that he can build a wall across the south of his country in a space of four years and in a moment solve the immigration problem and stop mexicans coming in it's the logic of the playground and the logic of somebody who doesn't really understand what he's doing what he's saying or what he's going on about the root of this problem is his wealth because if donald trump was a guy sitting in some bar in the midwest ranting on stupidly about these things people would probably pay no attention to him but if you're very rich people immediately take you seriously and there's another problem donald trump has managed to convince a lot of people even quite sensible people that he's a brilliant businessman where do you learn the art of the deal i mean what point were you working with your father and you knew that there were bigger things for you well i really think you have it or you don't have it and i hate to say that because uh you know it's it's something that i feel strongly about donald trump didn't write the art of the deal the after the deal was written by a man called tony schwartz who was hired to create the book uh he thought he was writing in a collaboration with the future president of the united states but actually when he turned up to interview donald trump donald trump didn't even want to be interviewed he sat in near stone cold silence in the room whilst tony desperately threw questions his way and yet because of the nature of publishing and because trump's famous name and hairpiece was attached to the work it became this incredible phenomenon this best seller which made people think that trump was a business genius and from that trump became uh the face of the apprentice again a hugely popular television franchise which was beamed into the rooms of american people if ronald reagan was the first hollywood movie star president then donald trump is the first twitter president but he's also the first reality tv president because a lot of people don't really understand television they think what they're watching really happened by being made to look good with some artful editing here and there and everywhere and with a bit of a scripted reality and with a whole production team working behind him donald trump was made to look like this incredibly smart decisive businessman but it was just television people believe television they believe what they see and they believed that donald trump was a great businessman he'd written the book he was on the tv program he had hired these people if he could do those things so well and run that amazing business empire surely he could sort out america's problems so why do people vote for donald trump why did sensible people vote for donald trump well it's called salience bias it's the same reason that people buy bright shiny things at the ends of ours in supermarkets they are drawn towards it and donald trump was very good at creating controversy even as the other side tried to put forward a very sensible case for how the world and the country and the nation could move forward donald trump was doing the most insane things dropping dead cats left right and center and grabbing all of the attention this added to the sheen of trump he became this cartoonish larger-than-life figure and people were drawn to it they believed it they bought into it but in four years donald trump has not made america great again he has not made america a better place to live the nation has been stuck in a rut and if anything it's gone backwards his international reputation is in tatters the role of the american president has been dragged through the mud and the country needs to draw back from it what we need is an end to stupidism an end to the dunning-kruger effect running rampant through our politics an end to salience bias and a bit of boring old sanity normality and proper leadership