Trump’s Astonishing Level of Ignorance
So…He was in his early 70s, had lived in the States all his life, was American, putatively could read, was on his was to visit a world-famous WWII monument….And he didn’t know what ‘Pearl Harbour’ was all about. Presumably this means he knows nothing about WWII either, why the Americans got into it, or how and why it ended.
This is why he understands nothing about ‘nukes’ and keeps asking why, “if we’ve got them, why can’t we use them.”
No wonder he has no respect for or awareness of the treaties, anti-nuclear proliferation agreements, and Nato. He doesn’t know what they are, or why they exist.
The reason he resisted Bolton’s and others’ insistence that he should respect the wishes of “one of our strongest allies,” Japan, over those of the nasty little genocidal dictator he claimed to be “in love” with, Kim Jong Un, saying, “they’re not our strongest allies — what about Pearl Harbour,” is because he’d just found out about it and Japan’s role in WWII. To him it was new news, like it happened yesterday.
“He was at times dangerously uninformed,” a former senior White House adviser said in “A Very Stable Genius,” a new book by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig. In it, they wrote that President Trump asked his then-Chief of Staff, John Kelly, before a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial: “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?”
The book said, “Trump had heard the phrase ‘Pearl Harbor’ and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else.”
Someone should brief him on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m sure no one has; it’s the sort of thing everyone assumes everyone knows about, let alone an American in their 8th decade. Let alone an American president.
Those, who’ve called Trump “a fucking moron” and “a complete idiot” like former Secretary of State Tillerson and White House insider Karl Rove, respectively (among the many, many others who’ve commented pejoratively on the man’s intelligence), aren’t wrong.
