You mean like Trump? Well, “smart” doesn’t really apply there, but whoever decided to let him be the Republican candidate wasn’t just a fool. But he and the rest of them have been out-maneuvered and are tools for the people, organizations, and thought/behavior patterns that “took over the world” long ago, and that have been conning and controlling things for a long time. Or the blatantly illogical yet accepted “wars” on “terror” and “drugs”? “Cons” are involved, and those and others are akin to cons, but the most powerful cons are those that involve entrenched patterns of thought that get repeated and confirmed until entire cultures think of them as reality, and repeat them in truisms such as “that’s politics”, “that’s life”, “that’s human nature”, etc.