Windsor Mann

Opinion columnist

The best interviews are those with extremely smart people or extremely stupid people. Self-proclaimed smart person President Trump gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he proved himself to be the latter. The only problem with reading the transcript is that you don’t get to hear all the words he mispronounces.

Here’s an excerpt:

“I’ll call, like, major — major countries, and I’ll be dealing with the prime minister or the president. And I’ll say, how are you doing? … And then you call places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and you say, you know, how many people do you have?”

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The president of the United States calls world leaders and asks them, “How many people do you have?” Not only does he not know the populations of Malaysia and Indonesia, but he doesn’t know how to Google “the populations of Malaysia and Indonesia.”

He also claimed to have received a congratulatory call from the Boy Scouts that, according to the Boy Scouts, never happened.

To be sure, Trump made some accurate statements. Speaking of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump said, “He was the senator from Alabama.” Also: “A lot of times I’ll turn on television.”

These were exceptions, however. When Trump is right about something, it is usually by accident.

His wrongness is constant. “For the last 17 years Obamacare has wreaked havoc,” he erroneously proclaimed the other day. This was after his interview with the New York Times, in which he asked his interviewers when Obamacare was enacted and, moments later, declared, “I know a lot about health care (garbled).”

Last year, Trump said that most politicians fail because “they don’t know how to speak properly.” This was a classic case of projection. The only reason there isn’t a comprehensive book of Trump’s false and idiotic statements is that trees are a finite resource.

Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t compensate for his ignorance with humility or principles. In both domestic and foreign policy, he doesn’t know what he’s doing or why he’s doing it, which is why he does so many things — from health care to divulging state secrets about covert programs on Twitter — so badly. That he proclaims his failures successes shows that he is not only ignorant, but arrogantly so.

“I believe we’ve done more than just about any president of the United States in six months,” he told the Journal. This oft-repeated claim — that he’s signed more legislation than "any other president ever” — is false. Six months into his presidency, Trump made 836 false or misleading claims — an average of 4.6 per day. As far as falsehoods go, Trump is indeed doing more than any other president ever.

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Presidents have an obligation to be intelligent and informed. Trump is neither. Consider his sources. According to a Politico story in February, Trump gets his information from “New York friends he talks to late at night on the phone, people he meets at parties and events, television segments he consumes every night” and, of course, noted experts Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. He said he doesn’t need intelligence briefings because “I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day..."

Now that John Kelly is his chief of staff, Trump reportedly is “sharper in meetings and even rattling off stats,” most likely: “100% of everything I’ve ever done is brilliant.”

Trump doesn’t read. “I never have,” he confessed last year. “I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.”

His non-reading shows. He said that Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War, “was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War.” Last month, at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump asked the crowd, “William McKinley, does anybody know who the hell he is? Do you know who he is?” Youngstown is 10 miles from McKinley’s hometown. Trump is too busy giving speeches about historical figures to read about them on Wikipedia.

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows that 54% of Americans are embarrassed by Trump. The other 46% either have a high threshold for embarrassment or aren’t paying attention.

This is understandable. Everything Trump does is a distraction from everything else Trump does. His ignorance distracts us from his scandals, which distract us from his insults, which distract us from his failures, which remind us of his stupidity. It’s hard to keep track.

Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism. Harass him on Twitter @WindsorMann.

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