He's appealing to the huge swathes of the public who have absolutely NO idea how to actually identify intelligence.
It's actually difficult enough where the stupidest people can't figure it out, and they use confidence, volume, wealth, and flowery language as a proxy.
Even when you do get people to accept that information is an important part, ANOTHER huge swath of people don't understand the difference between information and intelligence.
In short, there's a very small part of the population that can even IDENTIFY what an intelligent person looks like, so he gets away with this.