Trump has a dangerous disability By George F. Will
It is urgent for
Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do
either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not
merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of
information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.
In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said
that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job
and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is
syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical
howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s
verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.
Now, however, he has
instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil
War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully
imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that
the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says: “People don’t realize,
you know, the Civil War, 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?”
Library shelves groan
beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who,
one wonders, are these “people” who don’t ask the questions that Trump
evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the
astute “lot of,” or at least “some,” people Trump referred to when speaking
about his February address to a joint session
of Congress: “A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the
single best speech ever made in that chamber.” Which demotes Winston Churchill,
among many others.
What is most alarming
(and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is
not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary
knowledge about the nation’s history. As this column has said before, the
problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that
he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not
know what it is to know something… read more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-a-dangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?utm_term=.f13ebc33bedb