As a follow up to Betty’s post below, I’d like to look at the other thing that bothered me about our Donald’s grotesque Yad Vashem/Mean Girls yearbook note.
Here’s Trump’s deathless prose:
It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends — so amazing and will never forget!
Now remember what else we’ve heard about Fearless Leeder’s work reading habits:
President Trump is getting ready to embark on his first international trip later this week and officials have encouraged him to stay on script, despite him having trouble doing so in the past, briefing him with single-page memos as well as maps, charts, graphs, photos and have purposely included his name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,”
And add to that the fact that there is virtually no hint anywhere that the Cheeto-faced, ferret-heedit shitgibbon has ever read a book for pleasure, or ever will:
His meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.
No go back and read that note, a written work he had to produce himself, on the spot, inscribed by hand.*
Diagnosing at a distance is always a mug’s game, and I’m not going to do it here. I’m not going to say that Donald Trump is functionally illiterate.
But I am going to say that nothing on the record rules that conclusion out, and his Yad Vashem embarrassment is the latest straw in the wind to suggest that Houston, we have a problem.
To get a sense of what it means to say an adult is functionally illiterate, I took a fast look at a report from 2002 from the National Center for Educational Statistics.
Please note, again, I’m not a literacy expert; I haven’t studied up on this issue; I’m just reacting to the sense that something was more than egregious in Trump’s note — it was off. So take this next quote as representative of some sort of recent informed thinking about literacy, and not as the distilled essence of a body of knowledge to which your humble blogger makes no claim.
The NCES report bills itself as a “first look” at the National Adult Literacy Survey of about 25,000 Americans conducted several years before this write up. To contextualize its findings, the report’s authors described the definitions of the five levels of literacy across three domains — prose, documents [as in, parsing forms], and quantitative operations.
So how did this survey categorize the two lowest tiers of literacy in the prose category:
Level 1: Most of the tasks in this level require the reader to read relatively short text to locate a single piece of information which is identical to or synonymous with the information given in the question or directive. If plausible but incorrect information is present in the text, it tends not to be located near the correct information.
Level 2: Tasks in this level require readers to perform single, relatively simple arithmetic operations, such as addition. The numbers to be used are provided and the arithmetic operation to be performed is specified. Some tasks in this level require readers to locate a single piece of information in the text; however, several distractors or plausible but incorrect pieces of information may be present, or low level inferences may be required. Other tasks require the reader to integrate two or more pieces of information or to compare and contrast easily identifiable information based on a criterion provided in the question or directive.
Again, I’m not going to say that Trump’s demonstrated reading skills match these brief, rather formal descriptions. But that Yad Vashem note leaves me little confidence in Trump’s ability to handle the written word, whether he’s consuming or producing prose. There’s no reference to the place he’s in. There’s no response to the content of any exhibit or display he may have encountered. There’s not a single detail. It’s a rote response to a prompt: write something about your visit in our visitor book (or some such).
Those surveyed with weak or almost non-functional literacy skills found themselves confined to a narrowed life, or worse — the NCES analysis notes that “Nearly half (41 to 44 percent) of all adults in the lowest level on each literacy scale were living in poverty, compared with only 4 to 8 percent of those in the two highest proficiency levels.” If Donald Trump had fallen victim to that kind of constraint, it would be appropriate to feel pity, and even anger on his behalf; surely as a society we should do anything we can to ensure that as near as possible to everyone masters the basic skills needed to make it through the day in 21st century America.
But, of course, Trump has never suffered as a result of his inadequacies. He is instead, as much as it pains me to type it, President of the United States. That’s a job in which much better than functional literacy is, basically, a requirement. POTUS, after all, has a kind of broad brief, a lot of issues to cover. Most of the background information most presidents have used to guide their thinking across the range of their duties comes in written form. Obama, a well-documented avid reader, still used hours of reading at night to keep up.
Trump isn’t doing that. It doesn’t appear he could do that if he wanted to. His mind appears to be a reflection of that fact — or rather, reading is a habit that trains the mind. If you can’t or won’t tackle a text more complicated than a one pager of bullet points with your name in most of them…then you can’t think at the level events in the world demand.
In other words…Trump can’t do the job he’s got. Because he’ll still act with the powers of that position, that’s not good.
TL:DR — WASF…and we need to get this malicious reboot of Chauncey Gardner out of power as soon as possible.
Oh. One last thought. If I’m right, and Trump is as he appears to be, not cognitively up to his responsibilities, there are lots of people in his own party who’ve known this for a long time. And yet, come last summer, all but a very few lined up behind him. If he’s not fit for power, they aren’t either, not because they’re not smart, but because they fail as patriots.
/rant over
*To add: I found Trump’s performance reading his Islam speech to be a similar signal of problems with the written word. It seemed halting, almost frightened, as if at any turn the ‘prompter would put up one of those SAT words to gnarly for his brain to process in time for his mouth to catch up. YMMV
Image: Boris Grigoriev, Woman Reading, c. 1922.
ET
That note is written by someone who likely hasn’t written much beyond what he would write at a book signing event for one of “his” books. Sure this was litterally a book signing but his personality is such that he doesn’t recognize when something that is appropriate in one place is not appropriate in another.
JDM
In Jimmy Carter’s first book post-presidency, he mentioned how he was astounded at the quantity of reading the job entailed (this assumes, of course, that you want to do the job well). He immediately got himself and the rest of the family into a crash speed-reading course, and also got the family to do some of the less critical reading so they could keep him up to speed on it.
Steeplejack
Spelling is for losers!
The Moar You Know
He’s not illiterate. He’s an incurious, thoughtless asshole whose world revolves around him and him only. But not illiterate.
My wife teaches English, and some of those kids are truly illiterate. You’re doing them a huge disservice by lumping them in with this walking shitsack of orange lard.
joel hanes
I’m not going to say that Donald Trump is functionally illiterate.
I am.
Standards for the Presidency are higher than for admission to your State University, because of the important responsibilities (functions) of the office.
He can’t read well enough to function.
Therefore, he’s functionally illiterate.
I assert without evidence that The Donald could not pass a blind admission to the undistinguished state land-grant college I attended, and would have to buy his way in with an yuuuuge donation.
ruemara
I’ve been concerned that I’m not reading enough, since I’ve been concentrating on writing and numbing my brain on videogames. I cannot understand those who looked at this oleaginous lump of idiocy and thought he was capable of running a business, much less this nation.
Tom Levenson
@The Moar You Know: I’m genuinely uncertain. Yes, I’m sure he can make out words on a page or screen. But literacy isn’t just the ability to map visual symbols to sounds and represent those words in your brain. It also includes cognition performed on those sounds — can you figure out what the salient details are in a paragraph, for example.
Maybe Trump can do that, sufficiently fluidly and fast enough to keep up with the information flow leaders of complex organizations tend to encounter. I’m just saying I am far from sure that this is the case.
Corner Stone
IMO, he has a learning disability. Fred didn’t want to hear anything about that weakness so no one ever addressed it. He grew up and believes he, by the sheer power of his intellect got ahead so why bother changing? Learning is for losers!
amygdala
I share your discomfort with diagnosis from a distance, but this piece from today’s STAT News about his not being “always so linguistically challenged” at least uses him as his own temporal control, and is worth a read.
Corner Stone
@Tom Levenson:
That’s why they have to stick Trump’s name in as many places as possible. Otherwise he skips over the section because it is not worth the effort.
Bostonian
It’s like an all-purpose note. No reference or relevance to the occasion. All his friends? WTF?
Its also a plausible caption to the orb photo, which I now think may have been extraterrestrial genitalia.
The Moar You Know
@Tom Levenson: the fundamental issue is simply that the man is not smart enough to do the job. Which is obvious. Kind of makes it irrelevant that he is literate in both the technical and functional set of the word – he’s just too fucking stupid regardless to get the job done.
Corner Stone
I should say that IMO he started out with a learning disability, but when he became an adult he had enough money to bluster his way through. Now I believe that his years long absence from ever trying to actually learn anything has hastened on the advancement of mental deterioration.
Steve in the ATL
@Steeplejack:
Spelling is for loosers!
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@amygdala: I’m also unconvinced by “he’s [functionally] illiterate” arguments, and I think that’s pretty difficult to diagnose without actually testing him. However, he is – from any distance – observably lazy, profoundly intellectually incurious, and absolutely committed to the notion that his vast intelligence will carry him through any situation without needing to put any effort into understanding it or getting outside his comfort zone. Those are tendencies that typically become more pronounced with age.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack: i agrrie.
ET
It is clear he doesn’t read much – you can tell that in the way he speaks – but I don’t know that he is necessarily illiterate but I do know he has an attention span that is significantly shorter than the lifespan of a gnat and that if he hadn’t been born rich where he could pay people to do a lot of his work for him he would have to work menial jobs that didn’t require much reading or would much attention.
He is stuck in middle school emotionally what about intellectually? Tony Schwartz mentions in this in an article in the Washington Post and a CNN piece has the following:
This is an incomplete picture but it feels like it explains a lot about him.
Frank Wilhoit
All of which comes directly back to the fact that Trump’s people voted for him because they identify with him.
Tom Levenson
@amygdala: Interesting. Thanks.
pat
@amygdala:
YES!!! I have seen just a few of his earlier interviews and the decline in verbal ability is remarkable.
Corner Stone
Now that Brennan has confirmed there were interactions between Russia and the Trump campaign during the election, the media en totes is taking the tried and true line of, “Oh, but why didn’t anyone teeelllll uuussss?? We certainly would not have spent all our time bashing HRC over her server/emails *IF ONLY WE’D KNOWN THEN WHAT WE KNOW NOW!!*”
chopper
@ET:
the note is written by someone who only ever writes things via twitter. it’s basically a tweet written down on paper.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Frank Wilhoit: Trump said himself, “I love the uneducated”.
Bookeater (formerly JosieJ)
I have no idea if he’s got a learning disability, but he’s not illiterate.
I think people are overthinking this. The Yad Vashem note reflects him perfectly: he doesn’t read and so can’t quote better writers than himself. He doesn’t know history, so he can’t make allusions to history. (He probably didn’t even know what Yad Vashem was until his staff briefed him.) He’s lazy, so he doesn’t want to study up and have something to write already memorized. He can’t be taught or told what to do, so even if his staff had prepared a pithy one-liner for him to memorize, he wouldn’t use it because he’s the boss and he’ll do what he wants.
That visitors to Yad Vashem sign a guest book is a known quantity–or should have been to his staff. Whether Obama came up with his note on the spot or memorized it beforehand; whether he composed it himself or it was written by a staff member, he prepared, and thus his note is a graceful tribute rather than ridiculous, insulting and downright lame, as Trump’s is.
Oh, for the days (was it only 5 months ago?!) when the President of the United States could be arsed to prepare beforehand!
psycholinguist
Some reporter should troll him by asking if he’s read his daughter’s book, and when he says “yes”, ask him which was his favorite passage.
Iowa Old Lady
IMO, the problem with that note is less one of literacy than of a total lack of sensitivity to the place and occasion.
His impoverished vocabulary is probably related to not reading, but it also reflects the impoverishment of his thinking.
encephalopath
W was the same way. You could tell when listening to him give speeches that he couldn’t read the words and understand them at the same time. He could see the words the say them, but couldn’t comprehend them as he was saying them.
I used to compare W unfavorably to watching an actor perform Shakespeare. Even if you don’t understand some of the arcane vocabulary in the plays, the actors understand the meaning of the language and are able to convey meaning through inflection and imbuing the language with emotion.
When listening to Bush, you got none of that. You could see that he couldn’t do that because he didn’t actually know the meaning of what he was reading as he said the words. Trump is the same way.
pat
@pat:
Also, any time I read a verbatim transcript of an interview, I expect the white-coated handlers to rush in from the sidelines and take him back to the loony bin.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@psycholinguist:
Ask him which was his favorite font.
Scout211
Interesting article from Statnews.com: “Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?” by Sharon Begley
From the article:
“Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.
In interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which — and this is no mean feat — would have scanned just fine in print. This was so even when reporters asked tough questions about, for instance, his divorce, his brush with bankruptcy, and why he doesn’t build housing for working-class Americans.”
Very interesting read.
Scout211
@amygdala:
Oops, you got there first.
Gelfling 545
@The Moar You Know: I’ve taught those kids too, including some who didnt have complete letter recognition at age 14. Still, Trump may well be in one of the stages -there are degrees- of illiteracy. Some, for example, may be able to deal with documents whose purpose they know or short instructions but not with longer prose passages or material concerning unfamiliar concepts. Typically, some struggling with problems decoding the written word become incurious about it and take steps to avoid it as it frustrates them. I suspect, though, that some of Trump’s problem may be age-related.
Corner Stone
@psycholinguist: “Well, really, the whole book was done so beautifully. I mean, it really hit the things she wanted to hit on and with such class. In such a powerful way, bigly. Beautful, beautiful book. I just love all of it, believe me.”
amygdala
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Mental inflexibility is not a virtue, especially for complex decision-making.
mr_gravity
@psycholinguist: Two Corinthians?
lamh36
So basically, folks overseas are aggravated that US Officials are leaking to the US Press information pertaining to the investigation that they are hampering the efforts overseas…like the name of the attacker, the fact that attack may have been a suicide bomb….smh
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/23/manchester-arena-attacker-named-salman-abedi-suicide-attack-ariana-grande
Corner Stone
@pat:
I always expect them to burst in and grab *me*. Because the shit he says is so fucking crazy it is almost impossible to believe people voted for him.
amygdala
@Scout211: No worries!
mr_gravity
Seriously though, doesn’t exercise, doesn’t sleep, eats taco bowls and steak with ketchup….
how is he still alive?
why?
Mike in NC
@amygdala: Well, that was an excellent article. Somehow or other Trump just isn’t right in the head. But to his supporters that’s a feature not a bug. Go look at pro-Trump comments online and the sheer number of misspelled words, bad punctuation, poor grammar and so forth are revealing. They disdain education as much as they do “fake science”.
The word “elitist” often appears — probably picked up from some FOX News talking head like Hannity or O’Reilly. Maybe it used to be that they had contempt for elitists with college degrees. These days it probably is used to disparage anybody with a GED or high school diploma. Hell, maybe anybody who owns a pair of dress shoes qualifies as an elitist in Trump’s America.
psycholinguist
I study spontaneous speech for a living – Trump’s pretty good actually, when he’s off-script (by “good” I mean he’s fluent, and understands how to engage the audience). He’s figured out that doesn’t fly with a general audience/reporters and he’s unable to adapt a new register that’s effective. So, they’ve got him reading his speeches now, and it sounds flat out bizarre in timing, pronunciation, emphasis, etc. He seems to have no sense of the prosody of prepared speech. I honestly don’t believe he even reads his speeches before he gets up in front of the teleprompter.
Kay
@Corner Stone:
They really failed at the basic job of getting information out in a timely manner. There was a deadline. Election Day.
For some reason the congressional elections particularly bother me. Doesn’t that seem like essential information for voters to have? “Do what you will with this but you should probably know Putin really, really wants the GOP to win”
Felonius Monk
He never learned to spell cat because he was more interested in pu$$y.
Roger Moore
@Tom Levenson:
I think part of the issue talking about illiteracy is that the standard for literacy has constantly increased. It used to be that just knowing the alphabet and being able to read at all was considered a sign of literacy. Now we’re trying to define “functional literacy” as a much higher standard that includes being able to extract useful information from a section of writing that is deliberately written with traps for the unwary. It’s obviously a standard we would hope people could meet, but it’s far higher than people used to the “can read at all” standard are expecting.
Felonius Monk
@Corner Stone:
Not when you listen to some of the crazy shit being spouted by some of his voters.
Bookeater (formerly JosieJ)
Um, why is my comment stuck in moderation? Is it because I changed my username? I mostly lurk, but have posted successfully before under the username “JosieJ (not Josie).”
Soprano2
I have tutored students who are trying to get their high school equivalency for over 10 years, so I have some experience with what I call low literacy students. My experience is that the biggest problem for low literacy students is comprehension. They can read most of the words on the page as long as the material isn’t high school or college level difficulty, but they have a big problem with comprehension. If you have them read four relatively short paragraphs, and then immediately ask the low literacy student several questions about what they just read, they will struggle to answer the questions. Sometimes they cannot answer even one question about what they read less than 5 minutes ago. I suspect that’s Trump’s problem – he can read the words, but cannot remember what he’s read or comprehend a lot of it in any meaningful way. It’s terrifying to me that we have a president who has this problem. Most of my students are where they are because they were raised in low income, chaotic environments. Some of them can overcome their problems, but many cannot, due to the circumstances of their life (kids, jobs, etc. getting in the way of schooling.) That’s my $0.02 opinion based on years of experience.
JPL
@Tom Levenson: When he is reading a speech, it doesn’t appear that he understands what he is saying. There are inappropriate stops and starts, along with the occasional deep breath.
karen marie
The thing that struck me about Trump’s scribble in his “grotesque Yad Vashem/Mean Girls yearbook note” was the bizarre mixing of upper and lowercase letters for no apparent reason. Some words were entirely uppercase, some were entirely lowercase, some had an incomprehensible mix of the two.
I could understand a kid having issues with the physical act of writing, because we’re in an age where kids are doing very little writing by hand, and seeing it even less. But Trump is 70 years old. He spent his first 50+ years writing ONLY by hand. If you’re 70 years old and not illiterate, why would you be mixing lower and uppercase together in such a bizarre way?
randy khan
@psycholinguist:
Apropos of that, I’ve heard a couple of Presidential speech writers talk about what they did, and they both said that the President they supported was extensively involved in the writing process, especially for important speeches. So Obama speeches sounded like Obama, Clinton speeches sounded like Clinton, GW Bush speeches sounded like GW Bush in at least some recognizable ways. That’s not the case with Trump – his big speeches sound like he’s reading somebody else’s work.
ruemara
@mr_gravity: As a punishment to us all.
misterpuff
Site Will Be Slow For A Few Hours
Drumpf will be slow until he kicks.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Mike in NC:
Substitute “glasses” for “dress shoes” and the resemblance to the Khmer Rouge comes into sharp focus.
Corner Stone
@Felonius Monk: I agree. But even though they are batshit crazy I can at least understand Conspiracy Theory bullshit. And by that I mean the CT makes no sense but the argument flows from crazy point to crazy point. We can’t figure out how anyone believes PizzaGate but it’s all of the same piece or theme of crazy.
But the shit Trump says in interviews is all over the damn place with no thread. Unless it’s his huge electoral win.
SiubhanDuinne
@Felonius Monk:
Internets won for the day.
hellslittlestangel
Trump is not illiterate, he’s just stupid.
Ramalama
I’m going to tweet to Samantha Bee this post (@FullFrontalSamB).
She made a really funny / apt segment on Trump’s being illiterate. She’d probably love reading that an MIT prof thinks so, too, with your more diverse details.
You can view that portion of the episode on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LFkN7QGp2c
amygdala
@Mike in NC: Yeah, I wonder how this ends. Somehow the French Revolution keeps coming to mind.
raven
@psycholinguist: How do you feel about Krashen’s Monitor Theory?
Kay
@Corner Stone:
I feel like “Russia wanted the freaks in the Trump Administration to win” is a much different thing than “Russia wanted the entire GOP to win”. Trump isn’t a one-off. They wanted GOP congressional majorities. So…why?
It’s a whole US political Party. Seems newsy to me!
trollhattan
@JDM:
Perfect intro for linking to Dan Ackroyd in “Ask President Carter.” After stumbling Gerald Ford SNL had to recalibrate to Ubernerd “noo-cue-lar” engineer Jimmy C. We are a nation of swings and contrasts.
waspuppet
I call it Bored Wikipedia Voice. He toggles between that and Mussolini On the Balcony Voice.
gene108
I honestly think he has some level of dementia, which is why he can’t read more than a page, has no attention span, keeps watching Fox News (they repeat the same thing over and over again, so you can follow-along, if you have trouble remembering things) and can’t write worth a damn.
A 1980 interview between Donald Trump and Tom Brokaw
He is so much clearer at 33 than anything he said in the last two years.
jacy
@karen marie: I mentioned this morning that mixing upper and lower case letters is a form of dysgraphia — it can be from a learning disability, mental illness, cognitive problems or something as simple as being overly tired. I do it sometimes, and mix printing with cursive, when I’m overly manic or preoccupied. (Which is why I know ….)
HumboldtBlue
This is all so fucking depressing.
Here, for a refresher watch this short video about two Chinese men. One has no arms, the other is blind. In the past 15 years they built a forest.
rikyrah
The White Nationalist Appeal of Trump’s Budget
by Nancy LeTourneau
May 23, 2017 4:45 PM
As I was writing earlier about the lies OMB Director Mick Mulvaney is telling about Trump’s budget, I was wondering how all of this would fly with his white working class supporters. We are sure to see the requisite number of articles about how they would be hurt by it. But that is not necessarily representative of how his supporters see things.
Then I ran across this from an article about the budget by Damian Paletta and Robert Costa:
I’d be willing to bet some money that the White House official is Steve Bannon (or someone on his team). He is the one who sees himself as the champion of the “forgotten man,” which is his way of talking about people in the white working class. So it’s worth looking at how the shrinking of the “welfare state” would appeal to nationalist working class voters and how it fulfills Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp.”
It is important to note that for Bannon, this applies primarily to inner cities, which is code for people of color.
That kind of argument works once you have identified the recipients of government programs as the undeserving “them” who are separate from the deserving “us.” That is the divisive lie that Paul Waldman zeroed in on today.
Corner Stone
@Kay: I think it is at least two things. One is the fact that as Adam has noted, the Russians have spent time and money building up right and far right connections – NRA, churches, building an alt-right subversive force. And also that having R’s in office leads to more dysfunction in govt, more distrust of govt long term, and ultimately a forceful move to voter suppress their way into long term majority.
Just look at the radical change in Putin’s favorability among R voters in less than two years. They are primed to be Putin’s Patsies.
Mike in DC
I wonder if he can spell out this word, because it’s stumping congressional republicans: TR__T_R.
Roger Moore
@ET:
I think this is not quite right; you’re leaving out an important alternative. Most learning disabilities are challenges that can be overcome with effort and access to the right teaching resources. Dyslexia, ADHD, and the like don’t automatically condemn people to lives of menial labor; plenty of people who have them go on to intellectually demanding jobs.
rikyrah
Mulvaney Lies to Justify the Destruction of the Social Safety Net
by Nancy LeTourneau May 23, 2017 12:02 PM
………………………
One way they try to sell this myth is by insinuating that if you can’t visibly see a disability, it doesn’t exist. Beyond that, the cases of fraud are infinitesimal.
After an audit of disability insurance in 2013, the Government Accountability Office estimated that in fiscal year 2011, the Social Security Administration made $1.29 billion in potential cash benefit overpayments to about 36,000 individuals who were working and making more than $1,100 a month (the limit to receive disability benefits).
The 36,000 people receiving improper payments, while a lot on paper, represent about 0.4 percent of all beneficiaries, the report said.
None of these arguments will make any difference to the Trump administration in general or to Mick Mulvaney in particular because they already have access to this information. When they try to justify these cuts, they are simply telling lies, and it is very likely that they know it.
What these people can’t do is tell the truth—which is that they don’t support the idea of helping children, the elderly or the less fortunate in our society. They think everyone should simply fend for themselves as best they can in a dog-eat-dog world. If they suffer…so be it. Using that argument would not be politically prudent. So they lie.
cursorial
I completely agree with not wanting to diagnose at a distance. I remember reading a while ago, though, that while most functionally illiterate adults are at an extreme disadvantage (hence the poverty stats you cite), a small but surprisingly high percentage of successful CEO/founder types had dyslexia and couldn’t read at the level you’d expect. The theory was that those people adapted very early to getting other people to do work that required reading skills for them and avoiding situations that betrayed their limits, and those skills were useful for an executive in a way they wouldn’t be in other professions.
It struck me as possibly pseudoscience, but it fits with a lot of his personality traits – the tightly knit trusted circle, the need to be seen as intelligent and academically successful, the avoidance of any sort depth in discussing even topics he’s pretty familiar with. Watching him, it seems really plausible.
vec
I realize it’s a distiction without a difference, the man CLEARLY shouldn’t be president. BUT I think it’s all a function of his ADD/ADHD, other than functional illiteracy. Ancedotally, my husband has ADD, the similarities are there and I think it explains a lot!
rikyrah
Mitch McConnell and Vladimir Putin Want the Same Thing
by John Stoehr May 23, 2017 1:00 PM
I have thought for a while that “the Russia thing” will provide strategic clarity that wasn’t apparent in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Many tried to puzzle through what happened and calculate Democratic strategy based on that assessment. But when Donald Trump sacked FBI Director James Comey, the man chiefly responsible for investigating the president’s ties to Russia, all that puzzling seemed moot.
For the Democrats, the choice isn’t between “identity politics” and “economic populism.” It’s between wise policies that benefit Americans versus policies that benefit a hostile foreign power. Specifically, the task ahead is getting voters to see that Republican priorities are Vladimir Putin’s priorities.
Some would say this sounds like “McCarthyism,” and God knows Katrina vanden Heuvel and her intellectually deranged husband Stephen Cohen are saying precisely that. Their arguments, like so many in The Nation, appear frozen in amber, an effort to re-litigate mummified anti-Communist arguments that died long, long ago. But this isn’t a witch hunt. The Russians did attack our country by mounting a massive social-media campaign to sway public opinion. The Trump campaign did communicate with the Russians months ahead of November. The GOP leadership did know about Russia’s influence before Trump was the party’s nominee. If there’s ever a time for Democrats, liberals, progressives and anti-anti-American leftists to punch left, this is that time.
This is a fateful moment for the Democrats.
Our history suggests we live up to our ideals, usually, when we are faced with external threats. America was not a “melting pot” before the First World War. But the federal government’s recruitment shortage forced it to open the armed forces to Jews and “white ethnics” in ways it never did before. And to encourage such men to volunteer, the government mounted its own propaganda campaign to persuade all Americans of all backgrounds that out of many, we truly are one.
Same thing happened after the Second World War. The federal government did not care if Southern states were violating the constitutional rights of their black citizens or were maintaining a system of apartheid in which murder was legal. But after defeating two nations whose explicit aim was to enslave the world according to insane theories of racial superiority, the US found itself looking in the mirror and gasping with horror.
We are now in a similar period, one could argue, in which conservative forces have again paralyzed the nation. From gun violence to social welfare, from climate change to the assault on democratic institutions, the conservatives have claimed power where they do not have a majority and, thanks to judicial appointments, will maintain power long after white Americans have become a demographic minority. If nothing changes, we can expect the Russians to attack our election process for years to come. If nothing changes, someone is going to benefit. That someone is not the American people.
So the Democrats need to get voters to see that Republican priorities are Vladimir Putin’s priorities. Consider for instance, health care. What better way of wounding your enemy than by taking away insurance for tens of millions of Americans? The Republicans, in replacing Obamacare with a vastly inferior product, are moving to do that. And Putin is smiling.
Brachiator
I love books and love to read. Always have. But we may be living in a post-literate society, and this may represent a return to a more common condition, where reading was rare and limited to certain groups in the larger society.
Also, people admire the shit out of Trump and the idea that he is either too busy to read, or he has flunkies read for him, or his mind is so swift that he doesn’t need to read. And yeah, this is BS, but this kind of thing is very much admired by lots of Americans. Along with the fantasy of the hard nosed, hard thinking businessman who goes by his brains and guts and does not need no reading. Reading, on the other hand, is associated with being intellectual and being weak, feminine, and probably untrustworthy, especially if your name is Obama.
Added to it is this: I run across more and more people in tech who only do niche reading. Ron Richards, who hosts a show about Android and who also hosts a podcast about comic books, proudly trumpets the fact that he doesn’t read books, newspapers or magazines (long form reading) at all, and hates all television that is not YouTube. Another techie reads to his kids, but again avoids reading for his own pleasure, although he will listen to an audio book. Computers and modern tech allow people to be functional and illiterate in the larger sense.
Trump doesn’t read, but is quick to note how smart he is and how he went to all the best schools, and sent his kids to the greatest schools as well. But this also reminds me of the boyfriend of a co-worker, proud that he had a college degree, but who also noted that he was 26 and had never in his life read a novel for pleasure (he got through school on Cliff Notes where necessary). And I also recall a classmate, who was pre-med, who didn’t read anything that was not an assigned text because she felt that reading for any other purpose was a waste of valuable time.
So while Trump’s lack of reading may reflect some deficiencies, it also represents an ideal that some people aspire to.
We got screens, and Twitter and emojis. We got Alexa and Siri and Google Home. Our brains are in our tools, ready to tell us what we need. It’s a Brave New World.
Mnemosyne
@karen marie:
Knee-jerk reaction? Dyslexia.
ruemara
@Kay: Very newsy and probably due to their holding similar views on rampant kleptocracy as a divine right, as well as a willingness to use nationalism and bigotry to control a hungry populace. Starved dogs make an effective tool, you just have throw the right meat in their way.
Bobby Thomson
It’s not a literacy issue. It’s the sort of canned praise you would expect from someone who insisted on a 15 minute phony photo op rather than actually visiting, because anti-Semites are his base and his closest advisors.
LongHairedWeirdo
I won’t guess if he’s functionally illiterate, any more than I’ll guess whether he’s “narcissistic” in the Personality Disorder sense or not. The idea that he might have problems reading isn’t really here or there, for me.
I am bothered by what he wrote though.
See, I think George W. Bush wanted to be President to have all the glory and accolades and to be able to perform big favors for his friends, the wealthy (I reckon any of his true friends started, or ended, wealthy). At least he had a coherent plan – not a good one, but a coherent one. Big tax cuts, conquer Iraq, deregulate, ignore corporate wrondgoing as long as it only hurts people and ecological health, etc..
I don’t think Trump had even a coherent plan. It’s all about the glory. “What an HONOR to be here, as PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES to this solemn, powerful memorial that shows us just how horrible people can be to one another! Oh, and yeah, the Holocaust: NEVER FORGET! haw haw, they thought I’d forget to say ‘never forget’ CRAP IS THIS MY OUT LOUD VOICE???”
Gindy51
@HumboldtBlue: I am very impressed by these two gentlemen.
We did the same thing but we had power tools and tractors. We planted 10K trees in 8 days with just the two of us working 10 hours a day. Now our forest is totally canopied and vibrant with wildlife. It used to be a corn field.
Steeplejack
@Steve in the ATL:
Touchë.
Bostonian
@Bookeater (formerly JosieJ): He signed the same thing he signs in every single guest book, probably.
lamh36
Richard Collins III: Student Killed Honored at Graduation | Bowie State Student Who Was Fatally Stabbed at University of Maryland Honored at Graduation
http://ti.me/2qMaKXo
You can check out this guys TL for livetweet from the ceremony earlier today: @AugensteinWTOP 8h8 hours ago
More
Richard Collins III’s graduation gown draped over front row chairs at Bowie State University ceremony. He was murdered Saturday.
Mike in DC
UK deploying military to protect select sites. I guess they had Intel warning of further attacks.
chopper
@mr_gravity:
because god hates all of us.
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah:
Excellent piece.
Steeplejack
@Bookeater (formerly JosieJ):
Anytime a new nym appears, it stays in moderation until a front-pager releases it. After that you’re good to go.
muddy
@LongHairedWeirdo: I think Bush just wanted to show his daddy he was a big boy. “Mano a mano” etc.
Keith P.
Alright, popcorn’s about to get started, because in about half an hour, we should get our daily breaking Trump scandal news. What will it be today, I wonder?
Certified Mutant Enemy
@cursorial:
a small but surprisingly high percentage of successful CEO/founder types had dyslexia and couldn’t read at the level you’d expect.
Some dyslexics have superior math skills, which can come in handy…
Morzer
Trump lacks the basic empathy and self-awareness that would enable him to produce an appropriate, sensitive response to Yad Vashem. He’s literate enough to write something decent and respectable – he just doesn’t possess the basic emotional/intuitive capacity to do so. Remember his reaction to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and his bizarre rant at the Al Smith dinner. This is the same thing. He has the technical skills to speak and write effectively – but as he showed on those occasions he has severe defects in knowledge, curiosity and empathy. These grotesque failures are coming from the same places that enable him to lie so shamelessly and persistently, to swindle his customers so consistently, to abuse women in disgusting and exploitative ways, and to believe that the world must spend time cossetting a malevolent, vicious, emotionally stunted perpetual adolescent who is demonstrably unfit for any public office.
Corner Stone
@cursorial:
IMO, I seriously doubt that study holds water. I have seen the type of leader or person that gets ahead by having others do the scut work and then taking credit. We call thos people assholes.
I would honestly suggest that a much larger percentage of CEOs/Key Leaders are sociopaths than are dyslexic.
Roger Moore
@LongHairedWeirdo:
It’s not just about the glory. It’s also about personal enrichment. He sees the presidency as a gigantic business opportunity.
Miss Bianca
@lamh36: I am so sad about this, you cannot imagine. : (
SiubhanDuinne
@randy khan:
Because he is. And worse — not only does he, on the evidence, have little if any involvement in writing or even looking over the speeches before delivering them, but his speechwriters don’t seem to make any attempt at capturing his unique “style,” if that’s the word. Most good speechwriters will at least try to use the speaker’s distinctive vocabulary, cadences, rhetorical tricks, and so on. Trump’s people don’t do this.
Does he even have a dedicated speechwriter? My sense is that the various Senior Advisors, and Counsellors to the President, and Assistsnt Deputy Aides and whatnot just write whatever they feel like writing, throw it on the TelePrompTer, and off they go. Very little consultation or review involved.
rikyrah
@Kay:
You bring It up and it makes all sorts of sense, Kay.
Which candidates were helped, and which were hurt?
That they don’t bring up the hacked RNC also bothers me.
Mr Speaker, is the reason that you won’t go after a Congressional RUSSIAN investigation is because you were hacked?
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@rikyrah: It should be noted that the Social Security Administration conducts regular reviews of the people receiving benefits to see if they are earning more than the very minimal amount of money permitted to people receiving benefits. In addition they conduct regular reviews of the people receiving disability benefits to see if their health issues have improved sufficiently for them to work full-time. They also energetically pursue the return of overpayments, and have a team of fraud investigators.
Mulvaney almost certainly got those facts from SSA reports, and then preceded to distort them for his own purposes. It would be remarkable for a set of programs as large as the SSA retirement, survivors, and disability programs not to have some attempt to abuse the system. The wonder is that there is as little abuse as there is.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Kay,
Is the weasel that ran against Sherrod Brown last time running against him again?
ThresherK
@a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio): So, another public system more efficiently-run than the (even the fantasy of) its private-sector counterpart?
Color me not surprised.
rikyrah
@lamh36:
Ever since I first read the story, my heart broke.??
Lavocat
He’s Chauncey Gardiner without the class.
lamh36
Sooo…Sean KKKlannity is really having a public breakdown over the Seth Rich bullshit…smh…
I think Hannity is trying to get Fox to fire him…rather than him just quitting…because unlike Megyn Kelly or Greta, no no one is likely to hire him for tv again
muddy
@Roger Moore: I think those are both the same thing to him.
Patricia Kayden
This. Sadly this.
Morzer
@SiubhanDuinne:
That would also explain Trump’s tendency to go off the reservation in embarrassing ways – that’s when you hear the actual Trump speaking. He breaks out of the constraints imposed by the speechwriters and shows the world just what he is. The Al Smith dinner speech might be the most glaring example of this – the first half of his speech was witty, polished, rather good, in fact. Then Trump took over and boy, was there a nasty contrast. I have wondered whether he recently had some sort of micro-stroke, because his delivery sounds slurred, confused, at points almost as if he’s incapable of reading in his latest attempts to recite a speech-like product.
debbie
Lest anyone fear the Resistance will fade, Alec Baldwin is training a minion in the event he’s unable to continue.
randy khan
@SiubhanDuinne:
I completely agree – I doubt he’s involved in the speechwriting process in any meaningful way, and it shows. I expect he does have speechwriters, but they’re probably all responding to the senior advisors, who each want their own things in each speech, and without someone in authority to impose some order, you’re going to have a mess.
Patricia Kayden
@lamh36:
How can you tell he’s having a breakdown? He has always been erratic, angry, blubbering and deranged like most Rightwingers tend to be when they know they’re wrong. You would think he’d be ecstatic with Trump as President but alas, it is not so.
debbie
@rikyrah:
Agreed. I’m so glad the school stepped up. Something similar just happened at Ohio State and they handed out an honorary doctorate to the student’s family.
Higher education has more class than our government at this point.
Elizabelle
@Patricia Kayden: why i am in Spain. With no TV. Resist!
geg6
I do have some expertise in adult literacy (in another career, I was chosen as one of six adult education practitioners in the state to participate in a seminar on the subject at the University of Pennsylvania). I have said he’s functionally illiterate to my sisters (both also educators) many times. My English professor sister agrees.
Morzer
@Patricia Kayden:
Anger is addictive and conservatives have been main-lining it for decades now.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
I don’t see Trump’s strategy of calling ISIS followers losers succeeding any more than the First Bush’s insistence on mispronouncing Hussein’s first name (“Saad-Em”).
JPL
OT Seth Rich’s parents wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-seth-richs-parents-stop-politicizing-our-sons-murder/2017/05/23/164cf4dc-3fee-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.fc5edeb9a1a6#comments
In a perfect world, everyone who used his death for political gain, should be forced to read this on Fox news. Hannity and Gingrich should read it aloud twice.
Jonathan Marcus
Gotta watch those typos, especially when critiquing another’s literacy. That should be “…too gnarly…” yes?
Patricia Kayden
@randy khan: You can see striking differences between Trump speeches at his rallies where he’s just ranting and raving and saying whatever the hell comes to his mind and the speeches which he reads at special events such as SOTU. When he’s forced to read from the teleprompter, he’s halting, slow and sounds as if he’s reading the words for the first time in his life. When he’s yucking it up at his rallies, he’s waving his small hands around and stopping to enjoy the crowd’s applause.
Either way, his speeches, whether he’s winging it or reading it, are cringeworthy. Such a huge letdown from President Obama and his smooth speeches.
Felonius Monk
@Bostonian:
Alien handjob? We got him now. This surely rises to the level of a Clinton blowjob for impeachment purposes.
sm*t cl*de
@karen marie:
Count your blessings. At least he didn’t dot the ‘i’s with smily faces.
lamh36
Ok, I am now in the “Melanie hates Cheeto” camp.
Have ya’ll seen the clip from their arrival in Rome? They are at the top of the stairs ready to disembark Air Force One.
Trump seemed to reach for her hand, she didn’t slap it away like the time in Israel, but once again, she’s like NOPE..
If there was any sense of genuine affection displayed by the two, then the benefit of the doubt reading would be…she didn’t realize he tried to take her hand…but with the previous incidences, it’s like she can barely stand for him to touch her…hmmm
https://twitter.com/DaniellaMicaela/status/867057615926435841
ETA: Isn’t he supposed to be deathly afraid steps? So he was likely reaching for her hand cause of that fear, and as his wife, wouldn’t she know that?
geg6
Last comment got eated so…
I am or was somewhat of an expert in adult literacy in a previous career. At that time, I was one of six adult literacy educators in the state chosen to participate in a seminar on the subject at the University of Pennsylvania. So I have some expertise and experience over nine years in the field.
I have said to my sisters (both educators, too) many times that I believed he is functionally illiterate. My sister the English professor agrees. He shows many signs that he is. And being wealthy, it’s been easy for him to skate through life taking it, unlike the poor souls who are financially and socially crippled by the same disability.
geg6
Okay, all my comments are being eated. FYWP.
Morzer
@Patricia Kayden:
I think you are right – and the difference is that at rallies Trump is really just saying whatever is on his mind. He’s a miked-up version of the crazy grandpa you pray doesn’t visit at Thanksgiving. Formal speeches are simply Trump trying to get through someone else’s words as quickly as possible – and resenting every minute of it. That’s why the pressure in his mind to say what he’s thinking becomes overwhelming and leads to moments of national embarrassment as he discards the script to obtain some narcissistic relief.
SiubhanDuinne
@Morzer:
I remember watching the event in real time and thinking exactly the same thing. It was very nearly a Jekyll-and-Hyde level of contrast.
I’m not qualified to even guess whether he’s had a stroke or series of TIA events, or some other neurological impairment/degeneration. Aren’t presidents required to have regular medical checkups (at Walter Reed, I believe)? Something a lot more objective and thorough than his Dr. Feelgood medical sock puppet, at any rate. And once the exam is completed, aren’t the results made available to the American people? I wonder when Trump is due for his, and I wonder how he’ll work it so that the results are kept far, far from the fake media.
Uncle Omar
Propecia overuse? It has been advanced as a potential cause previously in comments here. A biology teacher friend once placed the following in his 9th grade final exam…”True or False. Hair is dead brain cells.” Perhaps he was on to something after all.
lamh36
@Patricia Kayden: well, he’s even calling his own network out directly, openly spiting their directive that the story has no merit…he sounds more unhinged than usual
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6:
Oh, dear. That happened to me a few days ago. Not moderation, just *poof* into thin air, never to be seen again. So frustrating.
BBA
This reminds me of that kid handing Trump a MAGA hat to sign, which he signed, and then threw into the crowd while the kid shouted “no!”
But I don’t know if it’s dementia, or he just operates on autopilot when he doesn’t care. Signing something? Okay, put some banalities. It’s merch? Okay, toss it at the fans, they love that shit.
geg6
@The Moar You Know:
Illiterate does not necessarily mean you can’t read anything at all. But a person who has no background working with functionally illiterate adults would not know that. I have such a background and I believe that he is functionally illiterate and have discussed it with others, who agree.
SiubhanDuinne
@lamh36:
Except that in Israel they were no longer on the steps, but on level ground. And there are plenty of videos of him walking down airplane steps by himself — either ahead of his wife (rude!) or solo trips.
However, it was kind of funny, after she whipped her hand away from his and brushed back her hair, he immediately reached behind her and patted her ass.
germy
@lamh36:
O’Reilly just signed a deal with The Blaze. Maybe Sean can find a spot there.
Elizabelle
@BBA:
Laughing out loud at this one. Heard about it when it happened, but it’s fun to imagine that scene. It’s like, graphic novel ready. You can see the panels.
germy
@Elizabelle: I saw a clip on youtube. Trump moves through the crowd like a rockstar. He tosses the hat into the air, and the kid’s father looks shocked.
lamh36
@germy: he just tweeted that big news was coming tonight on the Rich bullshit and “his future at Fox News”
https://twitter.com/GRYKING/status/867146980908204032
Gex
I’m left thinking of that old saying. Those who don’t read have no advantage of those who can’t read.
The asterisk being of course that this does not apply if you inherit a ton of money and can bully the world around you with lawyers.
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6:
I get that different people have different preferred ways of learning and absorbing information. Some are visual, some verbal, some aural, some kinetic, etc. Usually one is dominant, but all are available to a person with normal cognition and training. We know anecdotally that Trump is strongly visual, and that’s fine. He prefers pictures, maps, charts to big thick blocks of text. I get it.
But he seems to rely on his sense of the visual almost exclusively, and that’s very scary. I remember years and years ago hearing about an illiterate woman who relied entirely on the pictures on front of her grocery items to decide what to buy. The anecdote I particularly remember is that she bought a huge tub of Crisco shortening thinking it contained fried chicken for her family’s dinner, because the photo on the label was of fried chicken. I don’t think Trump is quite at that level — we know he can actually read, however haltingly — but if there is a literacy spectrum, he’d be closer to that poor woman than to the average middle schooler.
lamh36
@SiubhanDuinne: True…holding onto the railing the entire time I believe, but yeah…
Still, I know he’s obsessed with social media, so I’m sure he’s aware of the memes about him being rude and alwyas leaving her behind to fend for herself, or outright ignoring her…seems he’s tried to wait for her or take her hand much more than before…but she seems to be NOT having it…
feebog
Given Trump’s age it is quite possible that he is suffering from early onset dementia and functionally illiterate. Not mutually exclusive factors.
Cheryl Rofer
@geg6: I dug them out of the trash. Don’t know why they went there beyond the usual FYWP.
Hurling Dervish
It gets worse. Look at the photo and keep in mind that he always centers his signature in the text. Clearly his own message was just “boy howdy!” until someone nudged him to add “Never forget.”
Patricia Kayden
@Morzer:
LOL!! Sometimes you just have to laugh at how ridiculous it is that a reality star is in the most powerful political position in the free world. Unbelievable.
“moments of national embarrassment”, indeed.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
I thought we established earlier that this is old-school courtesy: a gentleman precedes a lady going down the stairs, and follows her going up, so that if she trips he can catch her or break her fall.
Theoretically, I mean. Obviously none of this applies to Trump. Never mind.
Patricia Kayden
@germy: SNL cannot parody Trump. Trump parodies Trump.
Patricia Kayden
@lamh36: Perhaps he wants to be fired so he can move on. Who knows? Cannot stand him so I’m rooting for injuries.
SiubhanDuinne
@lamh36:
Yeah, that’s my sense, that he’s heard all the criticism about his being publicly rude to her, so he’s now making a point of standing next to her, walking down the stairs at her side rather than in front of her. Those Inauguration Day photos of his bounding up the steps at the White House while she was left alone at the car, must have left a mark.
Say what you will about Melanie, she has perfected the frozen no-emotions expression, and except for these brief little body-language moments she is not easy to read. But the sheer number of them over the past few months put me also in the camp that she’s looking for a way out for herself and Barron.
debbie
Frontline tonight is about Bannon. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to watch it.
JPL
@lamh36: Maybe he’ll read the Seth’s parents piece in the Washington Post.
For those who missed it, here it is We’re Seth Rich’s parents
The Dangerman
@The Moar You Know:
Got it in 4. In his world, only Trump and his little Trumpy (where, oh where, is Ivanka) is of concern.
Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of incurious, thoughtless assholes whose vote counts the same as the rest of us in this country.
piratedan
in a way… this is all tragically funny… tragic in that we have a President who is mentally unable to do the job, surrounding himself with a group of folks who are more concerned with their own pet agendas (be they enriching themselves or promoting fascism) than the country. Aided by a group of politicians that have no focus outside of what apparently is Cleek’s Law. They are in fact supported by an entire media empire that is able to proclaim a new daily outrage sans facts on an hourly basis and how come all of these people aren’t deliriously happy, they won (granted, they may have cheated, but they’re in charge now)
I wonder if it would serve our best interest to give these folks a million dollars each, relocate them to a place where there’s golfing and ask them to just fuck off and don’t do anything while the rest of us go about doing what needs to be done. My guess is that these fuckers would want that to be a yearly stipend until they die.
JPL
@SiubhanDuinne: Botox treatments do wonders.
Iowa Old Lady
My husband always charges ahead of me. I could fall in a ditch and it would take him some time to notice, much less come back for me. I’ve decided to take it as a sign that he sees me as independent.
mai naem mobile
This is a really depressing thread. I don’t really care what’s wrong with him. Whether he’s got dementia, an undiagnosed learning disability, he’s lazy or he’s got psych issues. The point is all those make him unqualified to be POTUS.
BTW, I always understood that when people mix upper and lower cases, it means they have a very low level of education/literacy.
SiubhanDuinne
@Hurling Dervish:
Ow, wow, that is a great catch on your part! Yes, now that I look at it closely, the “+ will Never Forget!” is clearly added on.
Even with handwriting, it’s all about the kerning :-)
Felonius Monk
@debbie:
When I first read that line, I immediately thought of Frontline flea & tick collars for dogs. Seemed appropriate. ;)
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
Oh, indeed. Probably a bit of expensive nip-tuck as well. You don’t get cat eyes like that without a bit of assistance.
TenguPhule
@mr_gravity:
Proof that evil is intelligently designed.
germy
@mai naem mobile:
What I’m more depressed by are all the people who saw him and decided he was worthy of their vote, and by a system that elected him even though the candidate I voted for got three million more votes than the winner.
japa21
OT, sort of. Today 97 people became citizens of the US in a ceremony at the US District Court of Northern Illinois. My DIL was one of them. The ceremony, once it actually started, was quite nice. The judge, whose parents immigrated here from India in 1970, gave a very good address about the responsibility of citizenship. He also talked about how the preamble of the Constitution , as they all know, starts “We the people” and how they are now part of “the people” and therefore part of the government.
The new citizens came from 34 different countries, or as the judge stated, “From Angola to Vietnam and everywhere in between”. He talked about how this country is not a unicultural country and how important it is to respect the various cultures they all bring to the country.
As I looked around, I realized I was looking at the future and why the GOP, specially the far right GOP, are so worried, Of those 97 people, perhaps 20 would fall into the white, non-Hispanic category. The rest were an amalgamation of every race, creed, color, ethnicity, you name it. There were two women wearing hijabs being sworn in, and a couple more whose spouses were being sworn in.
One final thing. The judge made a strong plea to all of them to use their right to vote and, as they left the courtroom, each received a voter’s registration form. I saw several, perhaps half, already filling them out on the spot. All in all, despite what this country is going through, what I saw today gave me hope for the future.
Cheryl Rofer
@japa21: I renewed my driver’s license today, and one of the questions was whether I wanted to update my voting registration. Since I had just voted in a local referendum a few weeks ago, I knew my voting registration was in order. But good to see that there’s one more checkpoint to remind people.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne:
Modeling career and Botox.
Iowa Old Lady
@japa21: That’s inspiring.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Decades of observation that Republicans and their supporters are America's worst enemies.
Morzer
@SiubhanDuinne:
Knowing Trump he’ll get his pet witch-doctor to lie for him and then go on TV the next day and announce that he has the best strokes and Putin told him that they were impressive.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL: That was the subject of KO’s “Resistance” piece yesterday, he was shrill(KKKlanity, SMotI, local FOX news “reporter”, et al should all burn in hell).
hedgehog mobile
@japa21: Beautiful. Thank you.
Baud
@japa21: Congrats. We can use all the help we can get.
Morzer
@Kay:
Russia wanted chaos. They got that and it just so happened that it coincided with incompetence by the Democrats and the media screwing up big time. Result: GOP majorities and a complete inability to make credible policy. Putin got a much better return on investment than he could have imagined. (I suspect he anticipated a weakened Clinton facing a hostile GOP for 4 years so that he could strengthen Russia relative to the US without any sort of interruption or deterrent. Trump was a bonus.)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Baud!2020!, I can use all the help I can get!
Schlemazel
@JDM:
This is not a new thing, Evelyn Wood became a thing after word got out that President Kennedy used her speed reading training & encouraged his staff to take it also. I was sent to a class by my management & still use some of the skills.
I m sure St. Ronald and Boy Blunder didn’t bother. With hair furor it is pretty obvious he is incapable of education
SiubhanDuinne
@japa21:
That is lovely. Congratulations and welcome to your daughter in law, and to all her fellow new citizens. And how great to know that voter registration, and the importance of voting, was emphasized at the ceremony. Gives me great hope.
TenguPhule
@piratedan:
No no no. You steal a page from their book.
Promise them a million dollars to relocate to a deserted island.
When they arrive, carpet bomb until not one rock is standing on another.
Break out the champagne.
/Book of Republican, Chapter II, Verse 1: Fleecing the Mark, then getting rid of the evidence.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: How soon before it’s safe to introduce a new American to Balloon Juice?
Central Planning
@japa21: I, for one, think that’s awesome. Can anyone attend those ceremonies? I think it would be really interesting to go watch one.
SiubhanDuinne
@Morzer:
He probably thinks that “TIA” is an acronym for “Trump Is Awesome.”
Morzer
@SiubhanDuinne:
And DOA is Donald Over All.
Bill Arnold
To TL at top, pretty sure that you’re correct. Also, he appears to be getting worse. Not physically up to the demands of the job.
TenguPhule
@Baud: Are they over the age of consent?
Baud
@TenguPhule: The age of consent for Balloon Juice? Isn’t that like 50?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I don’t think it’s safe to introduce my step-daughter to Balloon Juice and she’s been an American for almost 34 years.
Central Planning
@Baud: I guess I’ve been sneaking Balloon Juice, just like I did beer.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Good man.
japa21
@Central Planning: I really don’t know. They had a separate line for guests. We entered after the applicants did. I suppose someone could go there and go into the guest line. We were there before she and my son and grandson got there so they couldn’t have really know if there was someone specific we were there to see. I know they have had students come in to observe.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Belt and suspenders. If they didn’t get trump, at least Hillary would be blocked from doing anything by Congressional Republican obstructionism.
Iowa Old Lady
My favorite naturalization story is from a friend who was English and became a Canadian citizen. He was sworn in in a Chinese restaurant, and was amused that he pledged allegiance to the queen to whom he was already allegiant. He said the judge’s speech there was also inspiring.
TenguPhule
@Iowa Old Lady:
Not sure if I should be amused or horrified.
/Mainland Chinese food is notoriously bad outside of liberal enclaves on the coast
Thoughtful David
@Morzer:
This.
Cckids
@Bookeater (formerly JosieJ): All true. Add in that he has NO social skills or anything remotely resembling empathy for others; he obviously has no clue what to write. Sad for the dead represented by the memorial? Why would he be?? He didn’t know them.
TenguPhule
@Baud:
18. Just like driving and sex.
Iowa Old Lady
@TenguPhule: As I recall, the other people being naturalized were all Chinese and the ceremony was bi-lingual. My friend was originally scheduled to attend a different ceremony but was out of town and so was invited to go to this other one.
Another Scott
@The Moar You Know: That’s my take too. He is not equipped to have and express empathy and sympathy, and he reads a teleprompter poorly (it’s a skill that takes a lot of time to develop), and he’s a brain-damaged monster, but he’s not illiterate (functional or otherwise).
He’s spent the last 45+ years doing things to enrich himself and his ego. Reading for pleasure or to gain knowledge doesn’t fit into that, so he doesn’t.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Iowa Old Lady:
When he was working as a professor in Canada, my brother said he would never become a citizen because he wouldn’t pledge allegiance to a monarch.
TenguPhule
@Iowa Old Lady:
So better then even chance that the place served authentic Chinese food and not the stuff catering to what most Americans and Canadians think is Chinese food.
Ohio Mom
@rikyrah: Yes, Josh Mandel is giving it a shot. According to Ohio Dad, he’s currently ahead of Sherrod : /
Morzer
@Central Planning:
I am looking forward to President Baud and his “Hold my Balloon-Juice!” presidency.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud:
Suddenly I feel young! Thanks, Baud…you’ve got my vote.
Central Planning
@Morzer: 3 More Years!
sm*t cl*de
@SiubhanDuinne:
You mean BFT is not Blunt-Force Trauma?
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
I’ve never had occasion to read from a TelePrompTer, but I believe that if the reader/speaker speeds up, the TPT text speeds up, and if the reader/speaker slows down, so does the TPT. Must be disconcerting at first for even experienced orators, and for someone like Trump who likely has never even looked at the speech before delivery, I expect it’s panic-inducing.
ETA: And because Trump, as we know (because he has told us many times) is the best at everything, he would see no reason to acquaint himself with the mechanics of the TPT, or even go through a quick rehearsal.
Another Scott
@HumboldtBlue: Thanks for that. It’s inspiring.
Cheers,
Scott.
Gretchen
@japa21: Thanks for sharing and congrats to DIL.
Tehanu
@karen marie:
@jacy:
Jeez, I hate to seem to defend president* Dump, but … I’m about the same age he is, and I do the same thing on the now-rather-rare occasions when I have to hand-write something, because (a) I deliberately changed my handwriting in high school because I thought small caps looked cool and (b) I later went into a business where I had to give handwritten work to typists who thought caps were caps whether small or large, so I had to change back, and by that time it was really hard to break the habit. Dump probably has to actually write things by hand even less than I do. Well, either that, or I’m as dumb as he is, and I really hope that’s not the case!
Another Scott
@Gretchen: Ditto. It’s a great bit of news.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
Coming in from work, I’m going to put in my 1 cent worth.
The word used was functional illiteracy. That means he can not comprehend what he needs to do for his daily life. In this case of course the presidency. It is obvious that he is functionally illiterate because he can not read reasonably, he can not speak reasonably, and he can not write reasonably. I’m not saying that he has to be able to recite War and Peace word for word (something I’d bet almost no one can do) but he can’t carry out his duties even close to reasonable. Even for a moronic conservative.
As to the cause, I believe dementia plays a role. I believe aging plays a role. (I’m 2 yrs younger than dumpf and I have to bring my A game to work these days just to not make stupid mistakes, I can’t coast along on my experience. And I’ve been doing what I do for decades, and it isn’t new and extremely pressure filled. I’ve already discussed retirement with my boss, just because I can see that there is deterioration in my over all skills. And I’m checked regularly for dementia. I doubt that he is being checked at all. He is the type that will refuse any and all testing, because he is so far superior to the rest of us. Just ask him. Oh wait you don’t have to, he tells you regularly.
brantl
How’d this get through?
Bonnie
I have a friend who read about Trump’s father dying of Alzheimer’s. She is convinced that he is in early stages of Alzheimer’s. I wish we could get regular excerpts from John F. Kennedy’s press conferences. I was only a teenager; but, I remember him being very well-spoken and very witty. He made politics interesting to an impressionable kid. Trump is an embarrassment to this country. If only is supporters could see that.
Morzer
@Ruckus:
So much for my Baud/Ruckus dream ticket!
dianne
. I always thought Chauncey was at heart a sweet man but Trump is Benny Hill. Coarse, crude, classless. Common, as southern ladies of a certain generation used to say.
TenguPhule
@dianne:
There is no call to insult Benny Hill.