I awoke today to the above headline from U.S. News & World Report, which asserted that Donald Trump had assembled a legal impeachment team that resembled “Made-For-TV” entertainment, including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, the feckless prosecutor who considered a blowjob high crimes and misdemeanors two decades ago.

At first, the team surprised me. Didn’t Trump spend, literally, months eviscerating Starr publicly for being as incompetent as, well, Trump (just without using the name)?

Then I punched myself in the nose for being surprised. I should be lobotomized for expecting a modicum of consistency from Trump. Perhaps I have been. Maybe that’s why Trump sniffles so much; he’s trying to breathe in the fumes from the evaporated brains of those who hear him speak.

As is often the case with a slackwit like the president, I often find myself questioning whether there is intent hidden within the idiocy. And while Trump himself likely doesn’t know how a hat works, his GOP overlords may have subtly shifted political tactics on the American populace — particularly the under-educated and over-churched.

After all, does it not seem reasonable that the vanguards of the Republican Party (McConnell, Graham, Murdoch, the Koch Bros., etc.) would take a political pathway that’s been effective for decades, the “Southern Strategy,” and morph it into an easily digested Flintstones chewable for an American sub-strata that still holds to those principles — namely, Trumptards and Evangelicals?

Of course, it isn’t politically expedient to brazenly play on race-baiting. So this isn’t The Southern Strategy. Say hello to the GOP’s Simpleton Strategy. It’s like the Southern Strategy, only with way more better.

Consider, for a moment, GOP presidential tickets going back four decades. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won consecutive terms decisively, despite popular ridicule of our president co-starring with a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo. The notion of that as a deal-breaker now seems quaint.

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, took the Simpleton Strategy a step further, with dimwit Dannie Quayle as vice-president. Remember when Quayle tried to spell potato on a chalkboard? Again, in the context of today, with a president who spells “smoke” “smock,” the error seems cute. Back then, though, we must have demanded some level of intelligence, because Bush-Quayle lasted one term.

It was in 1996 that the GOP made its last attempt to scaffold a respectably intelligent ticket: Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Dole was a Senator, Kemp the former Secretary of Housing. Easily the highest combined IQ on the GOP ticket in decades. They were trounced by Clinton-Gore, winning just 159 Electoral votes, the lowest since Goldwater in 1964.

And with that went the last double-sanity ticket.

Since then, the GOP has seamlessly blended the Southern Strategy of the 50’s and 60’s into the Simpleton Strategy we see today. After the Dole-Kemp fiasco, we got Mensa shoo-in George W. Bush — twice. (“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”)

That was followed by John McCain and Sarah Palin, a VP pick McCain later admitted regretting in an HBO documentary shortly before his death. You remember Sarah. The everywoman,  a workaday mom who just liked to hunt wolves from helicopters after soccer practice.

Then there was old Mitt Romney. Here’s what the GOP offered: A president who, among other things, believes that God lives near a planet called “Kolob,” that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, that we should baptize dead people, that drinking caffeine is a sin, and that it is sacrilege to wear underwear created by anyone other than Mormons. And Republicans were stunned he and Paul Ryan lost to a black man.

So they have returned with their Simpletonest Strategy yet: Prop up a game show host and Evangelical afraid of women to the nation’s highest pulpit, and have them sing “Witch Hunt” in acapella.

And it may work in 2020. Simple is easier than smart. Keep in mind, as the 24/7s lament unenlightened districts, as the House asks voters to look up facts, as Democratic contenders bathe in a miasma of name-calling and Wokeness, this simple math question: Which is more likely to turn out voters — Playing to the lowest-common denominator, or praying for the highest?

Careful you don’t pass out holding your breath in solemn reflection.