Grey's Law also applies:

"Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."

This is definitely malice.

It's entirely possible to be evil and stupid, but insulated from your mistakes by money. The education and environment of the rich is highly conducive to socio/psychopathy, and selects strongly for it.

It's always this.

I remember some post from years ago by a person saying that Elon Musk seems like a genius up until he starts talking about something you're familiar with.

Thanks to the Internet, I think it's gotten both more difficult to hide your own stupidity unless you're careful with your tracks (the power-hungry often aren't) and easier to absolutely flood the discourse so that your inferior cognitive abilities are either lost or overshadowed by something else (like Trump doing everything he, unfortunately somewhat successfully, to keep people busy talking and thinking about so much more other than his ties with Epstein).

And it keeps showing with the political and corporate leaders. The smarter ones from the latter, unfortunately, mostly seem to be psychopaths and/or sociopaths, very keen on leading the former where they need them (currently supporting AI and preparing the bailout, curbing the competition before, probably staring jaw-dropped at the news of "AI going rogue" and how can be the end of humanity and all).

Imma beat the dead horse and say that out of all dystopias, Idiocracy (2006) turned out to be the most accurate.

Hanlon's razor doesn't apply to the rich or politicians

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

IME you should add "and laziness." to that sentence.

It's quite useful for getting what you want really. Make not doing what you want more effort. Most people are too lazy or tired to not give in for unimportant stuff.

Eg. when being stopped by the police, take your time finding your driving license. Chances are they'll get bored and let you go on your way before you've found it.