In an essay, former labor secretary Robert Reich writes that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is mind-numbingly stupid and gives multiple examples to support his thesis.

But there is another aspect to this and that is that SSAT seem to think that his followers are mind-numbingly stupid as well. Take the following things that SSAT constantly rants about in his speeches and which his surrogates sometimes parrot.

• The newer environmentally-friendly low-flow washing machines and dishwashers don’t get enough water to function properly, so that clothes and dishes do not get clean.
• The low-flow shower heads only allow a trickle of water and prevent people from getting clean.
• The newer low-flow toilets no longer flush properly and require multiple flushes to clear the waste,
• The classified documents that he is charged with improperly removing were in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago and since bathrooms can be locked, they were secure.

These are things that are obviously false. I know this from personal experience and I am sure that even his most ardent followers listening to his speeches also know this. Low-flow appliances have been around for quite a while now and perhaps at the beginning they did not work as well but my dishwasher, washing machine, toilet, and shower all function perfectly well. And as for bathrooms, every bathroom I have encountered only locks from the inside because there is no reason to have a lock that is on the outside, unless it is in a very public place (like a gas station) and the owners want to prevent too-easy access. So does it even cross their minds that SSAT is talking through his hat?

Like Don Quixote, SSAT has an enormous fear of windmills, seeing them as dangerous things that must be destroyed. Here are the falsehoods that SSAT makes concerning them. And whenever he mimics the sounds that a windmill makes, he gets it wrong.

• The land below windmills are graveyards for all the birds that are killed by the rotating blades.
• Wind turbines kill whales.
• The noise generated by windmills causes cancer.
• When the wind dies down, people will lose power in their homes.

These things are all absurdly false but unlike the first set of claims, they lie outside the daily experience of most people’s lives, though their implausibility should be apparent. The truth is that it is rare for windmills to cause bird deaths and that cats and windows kill many more birds. There is little or no evidence that wind turbines kill whales or that the noise causes cancer. And wind power feeds into the grid along with other sources and the grid adjusts to varying inputs from different sources on a moment-by-moment basis in order to provide a steady supply, a truly impressive feat of engineering.

So either SSAT is stupid if he believes all these things or, if he doesn’t, thinks his followers are stupid for believing his obvious lies. The question is why they are not insulted by their intelligence being so grossly underestimated.