On This Day In 2018
Donald Trump won't Read
It seems clear that Trump has trouble with facts and knowledge. Most people can only speculate why. But one of Trump’s closest advisors finally revealed the source of Trump’s problem:
Katie Walsh, his Deputy Chief of Staff, noted: “He didn’t read.… He didn’t process information…. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.… He was often…paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities.… It was like trying to figure out what a child wants.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised, though. The Atlantic had warned about Trump’s problem even before he was elected president: “He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”
And Joe Scarborough recounted this incident: “Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question. ‘Can you read?’ Awkward silence.
"‘I'm serious, Donald. Do you read?’ I continued. ‘If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?’
“Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.”
Can it be true that a United States president doesn't read? Well, when enough close colleagues say it, and it’s combined with the stories about his lack of intellect going back to his college days…when there’s smoke there’s fire?
So what does this inability to learn mean? As Michael Wolff noted: “Aides found that Trump could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.”
Walsh’s and Wolff’s insights were quoted in Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” which was published OTDI 2018.
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New York Magazine excerpted it here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html
@TheAtlantic reported on Trump’s reading skills in 2016: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-case-for-hillary-clinton-and-against-donald-trump/501161/
@joenbc told his story (with @morningmika) in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-you-read/2018/01/04/46d967a2-f18c-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
@GrahamDavidA summarizes in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/americas-first-post-text-president/549794/
Donald Trump Won't Read