It’s a popular trope in the mainstream (liberal) media: Republican presidents are stupid.
Ronald Reagan was dumb as a box of rocks. George W. Bush didn’t know the sum of 2+2. And President Trump, well, he can hardly read.
“President Donald Trump regularly struggles to ‘remember what he’s said or been told,’ an anonymous senior government official behind a new exposé on the inner workings of the White House has claimed,” Newsweek reported last week.
The anonymous author, described only as a “senior official in the Trump administration,” penned a book titled “A Warning,” which came out November 19. Much of the book, Newsweek says, is “dedicated to sounding the alarm about Trump’s alarming behavior.”
“He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity,” the official writes.
Often, they say, “the president also can’t remember what he’s said or been told.”
“Americans are used to him denying words that have come out of his mouth,” the senior official writes. “Sometimes this is to avoid responsibility.”
However, they say it often “appears Trump genuinely doesn’t remember important facts.”
The official says Trump was not sure if he had “ever even heard of a Category 5” hurricane (even though he has a massive resort in Florida that has faced numerous hurricanes). “Was he forgetting these briefings?” the author questions. “Or more problematic, was he not paying attention at all? These are events that affect millions of Americans, yet they don’t seem to stick in his brain.”
So that’s what an anonymous “senior official in the Trump administration” says.
But another senior official, who worked closely with Trump daily and is willing to be named, says that’s not the case at all.
Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders says Trump can “consume massive amount of information, process it quickly and make decisions.”
“I’ve watched this process play out so many times, sat in hundreds of meetings with the president, and the idea that he can only take in one or two bullets is absurd. I’ve watched him consume massive amount of information, process it quickly and make decisions,” Sanders said in an interview with Fox News’ on Sunday.
The anonymous writer of “A Warning” says officials have been asked to dumb down meetings so Trump can understand what’s going on. “Come in with one main point and repeat it over and over again, even if the president inevitably goes off on tangents, until he gets it. Just keep steering the subject back to it. ONE point. Just that one point. Because you cannot focus the commander in chief’s attention on more than one goddamned thing over the course of a meeting, okay?” the anonymous author writes.
Sanders said that’s poppycock.
“He reads more than anybody I know. Every single foreign trip we actually would laugh about the fact he has boxes upon boxes, file boxes where he reads for hours. The rest of us want to take a break, we wanna sleep, the president works the entire time,” Sanders said.