No Cure for Stupidity

The Flag-Molester-in-Chief is unable to grasp basic facts he's been told repeatedly

According to the recent book A Very Stable Genius, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, former White House Communications Director Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci once asked Trump if he was just an act and Trump replied: “I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it.”

The act continued Saturday, even after the first US death from coronavirus, when Trump went to CPAC. As Slate reported:

At the end of his speech, Trump decided to lovingly caress and kiss the American flag that was on stage while mouthing the words, “I love you, baby.”

On Monday, even as the US death toll rose to six, the act continued at Trump’s rally in North Carolina, where, among other things, he invited YouTube-bloggers-turned-Fox-Nation-hosts Diamond and Silk to the stage and smiled broadly as they did a bit mocking Mike Bloomberg’s height.

Presidential “performances” like these would be bad enough even if the country wasn’t in the midst of a public health crisis that has already been made worse by Trump’s rank incompetence. But the fact is, most people are no longer surprised by Trump’s nonsense.

The One Way He Still Surprises Us.

Trump has been President for more than three years. We’re used to his lies. We’re used to his laziness. We’re used to his narcissism. We’re used to his corruption. But his absolute stupidity still has the power to take our breath away.

Here he is yesterday, before the rally, asking pharmaceutical executives if the proposed coronavirus vaccine could also make a sick person “better, quicker.”

Just to underline the point: We are in the third month of the Coronavirus crisis and Trump still doesn’t understand how vaccines work.

And it gets worse.

By now, almost every cognizant being in America is aware that the timeline for developing, testing, manufacturing and distributing an effective vaccine for COVID-19 will be at least a year.

Except the President.

During the meeting, Trump repeatedly pressed executives to have a vaccine ready in “couple of months” or “a few months.”

At one point Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Disease was forced to interject: “Like I’ve been telling you, Mr. President, a year to a year and a half.”

An Inability to Process New Information

Whatever the causes of Trump’s mental deficiency, this is not the first time he’s demonstrated an inability to absorb facts that don’t match either his personal reality or what he just heard on Fox News.

Some examples:

• In 2013, more than a decade after the Central Park Five (who Trump had wanted to execute) had been exonerated by DNA of the crime for which they were wrongly convicted, Trump was continuing to speak out against them—even going so far as to argue with his own parody account on Twitter about the case.
• To this day, Trump still continues to recycle his claim that Hillary only beat him in the 2016 popular vote because three-to-five million people voted illegally. That’s after his own voter fraud commission ruled that the conspiracy theory had no basis in fact.
• And in the midst of the current coronavirus crisis, Trump stood at the White House podium just last week and told us “nobody knew” that thousands of people died from the flu every year. This one is particularly scary in light of the fact that 4,000 Americans were dying every week at the height of his first flu season, a death toll that potentially included thousands of deaths caused by his own incompetence.

Maybe he was just born stupid. Maybe there’s a medical reason. But Trump’s inability to process and retain new information is becoming a clear and present handicap for a President who will be called upon to make quick decisions during this fast-moving crisis—and others still to come.

Through this newsletter, I’ve explored the threats Trump poses to public health in articles about the incompetence with which he has handled the growing COVID-19 crisis, the thousands of unnecessary deaths that occurred during his first flu season, Trump’s refusal to allow kids in border camps to receive the flu vaccine, and the food safety issues caused by Trump recklessly deregulating pork slaughterhouses. If you’d like to support more election-year coverage like this, please hit the subscribe button!