Summary
A new book, A Very Stable Genius by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, reveals Donald Trump’s ignorance on key historical and geopolitical issues.
During a 2017 visit to the USS Arizona Memorial, Trump reportedly asked, “What’s this all about?” showing a lack of understanding of Pearl Harbor.
The book also details Trump’s confusion over India’s border with China, his eagerness to meet Vladimir Putin before taking office, and his frustration with anti-bribery laws.
The authors claim their findings are based on extensive interviews and documents.
The point is he is a prick who didn’t even care enough to pay attention to the briefing someone was reading him in the car/helicopter ride over.
But we see this time and time again where people watched too much House or West Wing growing up and want to “gotcha” people for not having an encyclopedic knowledge of every single topic they are ever going to run into. And that is a fundamentally stupid mindset that discourages people from ever admitting “I don’t know, let me get back to you”. I mean, just look at the person who is naive enough to think people know ANYTHING about 9-11 just because they lived through the early 00s.
But there IS a very big difference between quickly memorizing some bullet points (Pearl Harbor was bad. Japan attacked us but be cool about that because they are our allies… for now. These ships sustained damage so make sure you talk about how awesome they were. Etc) and remembering off the top of your head the exact number of planes a given pilot downed after heroically getting into the air. People think everyone needs to be President Bartlet with the power of an entire writer’s room behind you.
Which, ironically, lines up with a lot of the anti-intellectual bullshit that fasacists the world around have been pushing for decades. The villain with twenty PhDs is actually stupid because they don’t know one bit of trivia that the hero, and by association you the viewer, do.