Longtime viewers of The Great American Shitshow might remember the last time we installed a manifest incompetent in the Oval Office. He lied us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost us $2 trillion that we could have spent improving the lives of Americans, and destabilized an entire region of the world. One of the lies was that Saddam Hussein had connections to al Qaeda, which attacked us on September 11. There was no connection—we also never found those Weapons of Mass Destruction—but in this way, the Iraq War became an extension of our frenzied retribution for 3,000 American deaths.

It was also an extension of George W. Bush and his administration's attempts to bury the significant evidence of their own incompetence leading up to September 11, immortalized in reports on a presidential briefing from August 6, 2001, titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." That was actually just one in a series of briefings to the same effect, all of which Bush at the very least failed to respond adequately to, and at worst completely ignored. It's not like al Qaeda had never attacked us before. It seems the theatrical displays of Man Strength that have long characterized Republican presidential offerings prove less effective in protecting the homeland than reading your intelligence reports.

We must stop electing Non-Readers. Pool Getty Images

Since we adamantly refuse to learn from our mistakes, we once again have put a blustering incompetent in charge, and once again the whole reading-and-listening thing has proven an issue. Strangely enough, Donald J. Trump was perhaps the first major Republican figure to publicly trash the Iraq War, and specifically question Bush's record of supposedly Keeping America Safe. This was likely primarily to clown on Jeb(!) Bush on the debate stage, but it was also true. And yet, predictably, Trump learned none of the useful lessons from that scenario, likely because he knew little-to-nothing of the details.

It has been evident since at least 2017 that the current president does not read much of anything, much less the intelligence briefings prepared for him on a daily basis. This was true when we first learned, via The New Yorker, of then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster's attempts to brief Trump, which steadily devolved into farce.

When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “‘Thin it out.’” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”

“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “the White House” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’”

Just as no one in the national-security apparatus harbored the delusion that the president reads things at that point, there was no reason to believe he would start doing his homework in the intervening years. He has always been the kid who didn't do the reading. It's easy to imagine him in eighth grade: "Gatsby, he's a tremendous guy, big house, you're hearing about him more and more." He reportedly does not attend the Coronavirus Task Force meetings before he comes out to brief the press, as if to telegraph to everyone that he's only out there to scream at reporters. But it now appears that the briefings are the least of our worries.

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We've known for some time that Trump ignored intelligence reports at least as far back as January about how the coronavirus outbreak in China could become a pandemic and how the Chinese government was covering up the extent of the problem. He spent the following weeks praising China and its president-for-life, Xi Jinping. (In the time since, he has occasionally done a 180 and bashed China, along with the World Health Organization, in his search for a scapegoat.) He downplayed the potential threat the virus posed in the United States, suggesting the number of cases would miraculously go from 15 to zero.

And yet a report from the Washington Post Tuesday suggests he was warned on more than 12 different occasions throughout January and February that this was going to be really fucking bad.

For weeks, the [President's Daily Briefing]...traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week...The advisories being relayed by U.S. spy agencies were part of a broader collection of worrisome signals that came during a period now regarded by many public health officials and other experts as a squandered opportunity to contain the outbreak...

The frequency with which the coronavirus was mentioned in the PDB has not been previously reported, and U.S. officials said it reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts or other rapidly developing security issues.

There's the time-is-a-flat-circle part. You elect a moron, they don't do the reading and they miss things and it costs us. It's almost like being president is a hard job that not any shmuck can do just because they yell the right things about Certain People. The reading situation is so deeply ingrained now that either—or both—the WaPo and their sources in the national-security setup felt the need to clarify that this information was repeatedly delivered to the president orally. That is to say, there is literally zero expectation that the president has read a word of his briefings, so you've got to clarify that the words were said slowly in the direction of his face.

And yet, knowing all this, we continue with the daily absurdity of the press briefings. Members of the press wait their turn and then rise to ask the president some question about epidemiology or treatment or national security or whatever, as if he has a goddamned idea what they're talking about if it wasn't on Fox News last night. On Monday, it seems he escaped whatever contraption his aides had kept him in all weekend—following his musing, late last week, about injecting patients with household cleaning products intravenously—to hold another Rose Garden fiasco. After some reading difficulties, he embarked on a flight of fancy regarding testing, on which the United States is still not fully up-to-speed, and which is crucial to the reopening he is so desperate to see.

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TRUMP: "We want to get our country open, and the testing is not going to be a problem at all. In fact, it's going to be one of the great assets that we have.”



Nearly one-third of governors have said they lack sufficient testing supplies.https://t.co/KSKo7fiJC8 pic.twitter.com/RZ41N9eLGl — JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) April 27, 2020

In amongst the bullshit, you can see the core message: It's up to the states! Not my fault! The buck stops that-a-way! Yes, which is why the state of Maryland had to go buy 500,000 test kits from South Korea. Because the federal government has failed on testing, as many governors have said openly.

In truth, Trump may not even know whether or not testing is a problem, considering he clearly does not pay attention to his briefings—or, indeed, to any batch of information that does not feature his name within the first 15 seconds. When he told a bunch of governors on a conference call at the end of last month that he hadn't heard about testing being a problem for weeks, maybe he really hadn't. Or more accurately, maybe he'd heard but hadn't listened. There's also the issue of his "radical solipsism," after all, wherein he believes he can warp reality through sheer force of will, denying inconvenient truths and forging more favorable ideas into existence through sheer repetition. Maybe he hears about testing shortages, or about the imminent threat posed by a potential pandemic, and simply rejects it via some sort of defense mechanism.

Whatever it is, he is clearly unfit for the job we hired him for: managing the Executive Branch of our federal government on a temporary basis. He doesn't read, he doesn't know what's going on, and he should be fired for gross incompetence.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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