Still Baffled Why Republican Voters Chose Trump over Better Candidates

My president is Donald J. Trump, like it or not.  I tend to vote Democratic, and I probably would have voted for either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders over any from the large field of Republican candidates had one of them...all much more qualified to be president than Trump...had been nominated.  That having been said, I don't think that Republican primary season voters have ever had so many different, good candidates to choose from.  Sure, if Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio...even Jeb Bush...had been elected president in 2016, you would still be hearing all sorts of media criticism of them...some of it predictably personal.  But instead of these fine politicians, the GOP voters chose this Archie Bunker wannabe as their standard bearer...apparently because he talks down to their level...

I was always under the assumption that in a representative republic as we are privileged to enjoy in the United States of America, the population at large, cognizant of the fact that they all couldn't possibly be experts in the many different crucial decisions that have to be made at the national level, would instead elect a president, senators of their own states, and representatives from their home districts to do their bidding for them.  You might think that they would want these politicians to be operating at a relatively knowledgeable level while displaying the tact and benevolence for the society whose interests they are there to advance.  Instead, we have a stumblebum who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, coddled from infancy and indoctrinated with the erroneous notion that he was put on Earth to lord himself over others...and then expect everyone to meekly submit to him.  This was widely known public knowledge about Donald Trump for years...yet conservative Republicans chose him because they thought they could identify with him.  Had Cruz been elected, he would be pushing a lot of the same agenda that Trump is doing, yet he wouldn't be trying to shut down the opposition media, making racist statements, and poisoning our international relations.  No, I probably wouldn't be happy with him in there, either...but it wouldn't have been this constant daily flow of melodramatics.  Sure, I can understand why, in the general election to decide whether a Republican or Democratic should be our next president, conservative voters might opt for a nominee from their own party.  But during the primary process, to select this joker over so many good people makes no sense whatsoever to me...