Sometimes you have to step back and marvel that the president doesn’t know anything about anything – and that he doesn’t care that he doesn’t know. Anonymous aides have been warning us for months that Trump is incurious on matters of policy and process to the point that he makes George W. Bush look like Adlai Stevenson.
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The president’s close aides and political advisers, six of whom spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, would beg to differ [from Trump's claim that he was well versed on the health care issue]. Some of them simply laughed at the very suggestion that the president knows much, or even cares, about health care policy in this country.
There was the time, sources told the Huffington Post, that Trump couldn’t remember whether a strong dollar or weak dollar was good for the U.S. economy (remember, this is a guy who’s been inveighing against unfair trade deals for decades), so he naturally called… his then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn, in one of the few sounds decisions he made in his brief tenure, told Trump to ask an economist.
Oftentimes, Trump’s cluelessness extends beyond specific policy details into more rudimentary “how does the government work”
[From Politico...W]hen discussions get bogged down in details, the president has been known to quickly change the subject — to “seem in control at all times,” one senior government official said
NY Magazine
Which no doubt contributed to his debt ceiling decision.
Of course, Trump’s ignorance is hardly limited to the bureaucratic; he often seems not to grasp when he’s putting himself in legal danger, as when he fired James Comey, or when the Washington Post reported in July that Trump had dictated an incoherent statement regarding his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign.
Ultimately, it’s Trump’s unthinking impulsivity that seems to worry aides most. Ahead of a high-stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin, advisers confided that they were worried about what he’d say, given his “propensity for unpredictable utterances and awkward optics.”
And then there are moments when staffers just seem eager to confirm that Trump’s rhetorical non sequiturs are as ludicrous as they appear, like when Trump’s tweeted disparagingly about John Podesta during a G20 summit in Germany. “I have no idea what he’s talking about,” a source told The Daily Beast.
The dearth of knowledge about how laws, the government or the criminal justice system works, and the insouciance with which he displays his ignorance, are qualities that define the 45th president. This is a man who understands one thing better than anyone: how to whip a crowd into a reactionary strew of resentment and fear. After that, as his own staff has acknowledged for months, he’s got nothin’.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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