Donald Trump is only convincing his critics more and more that he is not cognitively fit to hold the office of president of the United States, and they were already pretty darn convinced as it was. This past week alone, Trump has dubbed former U.S. ally Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” and declared himself to be “the king” after claiming he has “unrestricted power.”
Yet this is just the latest in a long, long, long line of instances of Trump making abundantly clear he perhaps doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to occupy the Oval Office. Some alarming allegations made by a tell-all book published in 2020 are doing the rounds once again, and they remind us just how little Trump is prepared for the job that he’s somehow won twice over, from his ignorance of America’s own history to his lacking literacy skills.
A Very Stable Genius (a phrase that Trump once used to describe himself back in 2018) from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig made waves back when it came out five years ago for two of its boldest claims: that Trump was hardly aware of Pearl Harbor and he struggled to read the American Constitution.
When undertaking a private tour of the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, erected to honor the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during WW2, the book alleges that Trump turned to then-chief of staff John Kelly and asked, “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Rucker and Leonnig explained: “Trump had heard the phrase ‘Pearl Harbor’ and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else.”
Another incident documented in the book concerns Trump’s part in a HBO documentary from early into his first term in which all living presidents read passages from the constitution. Trump was tasked with reading from Article Two to the camera, but he struggled, stumbling over the words and requiring multiple takes. “It’s very hard to do because of the language here,” he told the crew in the room after one bad take. “It’s like a different language, right?” he said after another take, growing more irritated. “It’s like a foreign language,” he repeated, following one more failed attempt.
Sadly, the book’s claims hit very differently now than they did back in 2020. At the time, we could laugh a grateful, weary yet relieved laugh at his alleged idiocy, seeing as Trump had just been voted out of office. Now that he’s back in the White House, however, suddenly these supposed slip-ups become significantly less funny.
If Trump was, as one former White House advisor told the authors, “dangerously uninformed” last decade, then what is he like now? After all, the man is fast approaching 80 and doesn’t even seem to command the same kind of respect and fear in his underlings, hence, well, everything to do with Elon Musk. I guess he’s brushed up on his history, at least, seeing as he’s taken to quoting Napoleon. Although, strangely enough, that doesn’t make us feel any better.
