Before a phone call to a foreign leader, American Presidents are normally supplied with talking points prepared by staffers at the National Security Council, which is housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Because conversations between heads of state can range widely, such materials are usually very detailed. But Trump, as a senior Administration official recently put it, is “not a voracious reader.”
The National Security Council has a comparatively lean budget—approximately twelve million dollars—and so its staff consists largely of career professionals on loan from the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. When Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But “an edict came down,” a former staffer told me: “ ‘Thin it out.’ ” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos to a single page. “But then word comes back: ‘This is still too much.’ ” A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President is “a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.”
“By the time I left, we had these cards,” the former staffer said. They are long and narrow, made of heavy stock, and emblazoned with the words “the white house” at the top. Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials told me that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. Everything that needs to be conveyed to the President must be boiled down, the former staffer said, to “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run.’ ”
This. Guy. Is. Leading. Your. Country.
It is not enough that Trump is an unqualified arrogant racist asshole, who is not so secretly working for the Kremlin.
He is also incredibly stupid on a level that makes George W. Bush look like a Mensa member in good standing.
Every word he speaks reveals his ignorance, while his tweets reveal his immaturity and pettiness.
To call Donald Trump the Toddler-in-Chief is now considered an insult to toddlers.
I know we are supposed to treat Trump voters like they are not the dumbest people on the planet, but that becomes near impossible with every revelation about the guy they chose over perhaps the most qualified person to ever make a run for the White House.
They had the same information that we had, and yet they could not see the obvious.
Perhaps if we had written it down for them on memo cards with the syntactical complexity of "See Jane run" it might have helped them to understand the obvious.
Or not, because let's face it some people are dumb to the bone.
