It takes a medal-worthy degree of willful ignorance to know as little about most policy issues as Donald Trump does.
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Donald Trump has spent the past eight years either running for or being president (which is a generous description of what he did while in office), so it’s actually quite remarkable that he still has such a poor grasp of so many issues.
Apart from the very few things he cares about, he does not seem to be able to articulate anything resembling a coherent position on any number of topics.
That stunning lack of knowledge was on full display Thursday during his “press conference,” which was essentially just him making a statement and then fumbling through answers to even the most basic policy questions.
It is impressive how ignorant Trump is. In a way, it takes even more effort on his part to not understand what is going on once you take into account that he has an entire team of experts trying to educate him.
Let’s compare his “knowledge” of policy to Americans and the Olympics.
Right now, if you are following this quadrennial event in even the most superficial way, you have a rudimentary understanding of the different sports being played. For example, you know that athletes from different countries are coming together to compete in a variety of events.
If you are even a tiny bit more engaged, you will have heard the name Simone Biles… or even have a basic grasp of the scoring in women’s gymnastics. As a result, you might be able to fake your way through a conversation at a party.
“Did you see the women’s gymnastics? So graceful and impressive.”
“Yeah, that Simone Biles is really something.”
And, if you are allowing the Olympics to consume you for two weeks, you will know that Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour won the gold on the uneven bars.
Finally, there is a fourth category consisting of athletes, coaches, officials, and scholars who are either actively participating in the Olympics or know all about it.
That’s the level of knowledge a president should have.
However, on most issues, Trump is somewhere between the first and second groups of people.
For example, the former president is aware that abortion is a thing that matters to people (although he appears to believe that this issue, which tens of millions of Americans feel incredibly passionate about, is now of very limited importance).
But does he know that an abortion pill exists, what it does, and that his party would like to ban it?
Based on his answer to a question about it, that seems doubtful.
“Ok. So you could, you could do things that will be, would, would supplement,” he said when asked whether he would curb access to the abortion drug mifepristone. “Absolutely. And those things are pretty, uh, open and humane, but you have to be able to have a vote and all I want to do is give everybody a vote and the votes are taking place right now as we speak.”
And if that’s not clear enough, the former president added some “clarification.”
“Yeah. But it’s a very good, there are many things on a humane basis that you can do outside of that,” he said. “But you also have to give a vote and the people are going to have to decide.”
Oh, by the way, whatever the above means appears to be at odds with something Trump said in June.
If he sounds like a middle schooler who has to do a book report but only read the Wikipedia summary, that’s because that is the most apt comparison to what’s going on here.
Trump doesn’t understand most issues (or how people feel about them), and he certainly never does his homework.
Throughout the press conference that was evident whenever he was asked about specific things. His answers sometimes contain nuggets of accurate information, but they hardly ever make any sense at all.
Why does he get away with that?
On the one hand, perhaps because the average American also doesn’t understand many of these policy issues any better than Trump.
On the other hand, it’s because journalists (like the teachers who are giving little Donny a D even though he clearly didn’t read the book), are grading Trump on a curve.
Take this headline from The Washington Post: “Trump suggests he’s open to revoking access to abortion pill.”
It takes some heavy lifting on the part of the writer to parse the former president’s words in a way that supports that headline.
But this happens every day in major news outlets.
Afraid to say “Trump is once again incoherent,” they assign meaning to his rambling nonsense.
And, as a result, whenever the media makes it sound as though the former president deserves a passing grade, they are failing the rest of us.
