He has a good brain
by digby
I wrote about our historian in chief for Salon this morning:
President Donald Trump said something profoundly ignorant yesterday. I know that shocks you. He is, after a man who has told you over and over again that he is smarter than just about anyone you’d want to mention. He has said:
“I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.“
“I understand money better than anybody. I understand it far better than Hillary, and I’m way up on the economy when it comes to questions on the economy.”
When asked why he refuses to take the daily intelligence briefing, he explained:
I don’t have to be told – you know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years.
“Nobody knows more about trade than me”
“Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump.”
Regarding the legality of his travel ban:
I was a good student. I understand things. I comprehend very well, better than I think almost anybody.
“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am“
“I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”
At the CIA right after the inauguration he said:
Trust me, I’m like a smart person
“There is nobody who understands the horror of nuclear more than me.”
On who he consults on foreign affairs:
I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things … My primary consultant is myself, and I have, you know, I have a good instinct for this stuff.
My uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true!
You can read the whole comment in this tweet:
This is a sentence spoken by Trump, not a piece of modernist stream-of-consciousness pastiche. pic.twitter.com/vfhdKzg9Uy— Stig Abell (@StigAbell) August 9, 2016
That’s just small sample of the times he’s asserted that he is gifted with a vast knowledge and prodigious intellect that far outstrips anyone else in the entire world, perhaps anyone else who has ever lived. And apparently millions of people believed him, likely because he has a lot of money. Apparently they didn’t know that along with his extraordinary “genetic inheritance” came an extraordinary financial bequest. (Trump literally believes in eugenics, often comparing him and his family to thoroughbred racehorses with superior breeding.)
So for all that it’s odd that a man of such unequaled intelligence would say, for instance, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice” apparently unaware that Frederick Douglas is one of the most famous figures in American history, studied by every schoolkid, and that he’s been dead for over a century.
And his comments about Andrew Jackson this week seem equally strange for a man of such erudition. He said to reporter Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner:
My campaign and win was most like Andrew Jackson, with his campaign. And I said, when was Andrew Jackson? It was 1828. That’s a long time ago. That’s Andrew Jackson …
I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to he Civil War, he said “There’s no reason for this.” 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?
TRUMP: We are living in a time that’s as evil as any time that there has ever been. You know, when I was a young man, I studied Medieval times. That’s what they did, they chopped off heads. That’s what we have …
STEPHANOPOULOS: So we’re going to chop off heads?
TRUMP: We’re going to do things beyond waterboarding perhaps, if that happens to come.
Of course he got that wrong too, insisting that nobody had “chopped off heads” since those medieval times, apparently unaware of the beheading spree of the French revolution.
Trump compulsively watches hours and hours of cable news shows so he says doesn’t have time to read books (or briefing reports, for that matter.) He claims he doesn’t need to because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”
Trump defenders on television insist that it’s unfair to criticize him for his imprecise language and confused rendering of history, that everyone is holding him to an impossible standard. But he’s the one who set this standard by bragging endlessly that he is smarter than everyone in the world and has no need for facts or information because he inherently knows the right answer. When he proves otherwise, as he does nearly every day, he only has himself to blame if people point out that he has said something embarrasingly wrong.