This weekend, for some godforsaken reason, Donald Trump elected to give yet another wide-ranging sit-down interview, this one with the Washington Examiner's Salena Zito. Given that his last two ventures into this space ended with him complaining that being president is too hard and favorably comparing his television appearances to September 11, the bar for absurdity was impressively high entering this third go-round. But Trump, ever the innovator, was prepared for the challenge. Discussing comparisons between his campaign and that of Andrew Jackson, a slaveholding Tennessean who was responsible for the Trail of Tears, the President of the United States opined as follows:

TRUMP: The people of Tennessee are amazing people. Well, they love Andrew Jackson. They love Andrew Jackson in Tennessee.

ZITO: He’s a fascinating—

TRUMP, ENTIRELY NEEDLESSLY: I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was—he was a very tough person, but he had a big heart.

Yet another example, I'm sure, of someone who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.

TRUMP, INEXPLICABLY CONTINUING: And he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There’s no reason for this.”

As any student of Jackson's career and/or person with access to Wikipedia could tell you, Andrew Jackson died in 1845, and his presidential term ended in 1837, which was a solid quarter-century before the Civil War began.

TRUMP, PROFESSORIALLY: People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, um—

ZITO, GRACIOUSLY PROVIDING HIM A WAY OUT OF FINISHING THAT THOUGHT: Yeah—

TRUMP, CHANNELING HIS INNER PFTCOMMENTER: If you think about it—why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

Sometimes I wonder if Donald Trump believes that he has been wired with the same contraption attached to the bus in Speed, where something catastrophic will happen if he allows the pace of incoherent thoughts emanating from his mouth to fall below a certain threshold.

Set aside, for a moment, the astonishing historical illiteracy required to make statements like these with a straight face. This is not the first time Donald Trump has said something stupid, and I'm reasonably confident it won't be the last. What's so baffling about this round of inane comments is that they come at a time when he's trying like hell to portray himself as a serious, policy-oriented, results-driven president, instead of the bumbling oaf who just wrapped his first hundred days in office with laughably little to show for it. If I'm—[takes deep breath, dons MAGA hat, adjusts bow tie]—a young staffer in this White House, and I'm absolutely busting my ass to take health care away from poor people or gift a gigantic tax cut to the rich or whatever else it is that young ex-College Republicans types fancy these days, I'm furious that my cable television-obsessed boss continues to insist on going on national television and finding innovative, antebellum-themed ways to undermine everything I'm trying to do for him.

The useless "Donald Trump is trying to distract us" narrative is usually deployed in the context of Trump purportedly intentionally doing one thing in order to distract from another. But for those with a vested interest in wringing substantive legislative results out of an administration that has, thus far, demonstrated neither the desire nor the ability to get much done, the president's distractions are not the manifestation of some sinister master plan, but are instead needless, self-inflicted wounds that gum up the gears of the policymaking process. It is profoundly difficult to get Democrats—or anyone, really—to seriously consider backing the White House on anything when the man in charge keeps happily reaffirming his status as a national embarrassment.

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