Let us put aside the conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump doesn’t know how to read and settle for the much more verifiable claim that he does not like to read—that he has a vanishingly small attention span that is catered to by the screaming falcon effects and instant punditry of cable news, and that his media diet outside of that gruel consists of shit that aggravates his id on the internet. With that in mind, let us next turn to this pull quote from the president’s interview with bow-tied good boy Tucker Carlson, in which the president seemingly attempts to convince Carlson, then himself, that he enjoys reading, before losing steam on the whole effort and going back to his normal brand of enthusiastic gibberish.
You can almost imagine Mike Pence or Paul Ryan earnestly giving Trump a book on Andrew Jackson, and him flipping around between the pages for a minute or so every couple of days before starting to look at his phone again. It’s a revealing moment from the president, an attempt to imply a richer intellectual life followed by a prompt confession that it is a sham, a thesis that is corroborated by the president’s own words:
And also his own actions, namely the fact that he and his team cannot spell a damn thing right and seem to lack even the basic awareness of “googling things.” Just weeks after misspelling the three-letter word “tap” and fucking up a basic holiday hat, and one day after reading an “Irish proverb” written by a Nigerian poet, the president tweeted out this St. Patrick’s Day hat tip this morning:
Unfortunately, for fuck’s sake, there isn’t an “h” in “Padraig,” as even Google autocomplete knows.