When assessing the president's suitability for the role he currently occupies, it's easy to get caught up on things like, he is making American policy towards other countries while their governments put money in his pocket. Or he has hired a bunch of lobbyists to regulate industries on whose behalf they were recently lobbying. Or he instituted a regime of human-rights abuses at the southern border. Or he said very fine people march alongside Nazis. Or, most recently, he pressured a foreign power to interfere in an American presidential election for his personal political gain, a betrayal of his oath of office and the nation he purports to lead.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

But there's something else to consider in all of this. The president, you see, is insanely fucking stupid. Part of what Trumpographer Tim O'Brien called his "radical solipsism" is an almost militant incuriosity. Anything worth knowing about the world, Donald Trump believes he already knows. If he doesn't know it, it's not worth knowing. Besides, if there are inconvenient features of observable reality, they can be bent or twisted or simply denied, relentlessly, until they cease to exist. Other things can be invented and made real through sheer force of repetition. But one thing you don't need to do is sit down and learn new things, or listen when people talk about boring stuff.

That's why, when the president is asked about some country in the world, he will inevitably say, "Libya? People are talking about it more and more. They're doing big things over there, really working hard, and we're gonna take a look at it." He does not know a damn thing about Libya. He doesn't want to. He doesn't care. Was it on the teevee? No? It might as well not exist. He is not going to read some briefing on Libya in between all-caps rage tweets directed at the Federal Reserve. He is not going to read anything.

Sometimes, however, the president will say or tweet something that makes his obvious ignorance about world affairs look like a minor issue in the stupid stakes. The guy does not know basic grammar. His syntax puts the English language on the rack. And sometimes, he seems absolutely determined to put this on public display. Like this fine Friday morning.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Sweet Baby Jesus. Where do you even begin.

Here is Donald J. Trump, the President of These United States, demonstrating that he believes an apostrophe is called a hyphen. Not only that, it was part of a rant directed at a cable news network complaining that said cable news network did not include the "hyphen"—it's an apostrophe—in the low-energy nickname the president devised for a Democratic congressman leading an investigation into whether he should be impeached for betraying the country. He continues his rant at the cable news network by insisting he meant all along to spell the nickname as "Liddle," which is probably true, and yet one can't help but wonder, doesn't the fucking president have something else to do this morning? I mean, forget the affairs of state over which we've given this man total control. Shouldn't he be organizing his legal defense? Also, he misspelled "describing."

At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison argued that the document would need a provision "for defending the community against the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate." Madison worried the president in the system they were designing could "pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation" (embezzlement) or "he might betray his trust to foreign powers." But what if he's also negligent and incapable because he's extraordinarily dumb?