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.
Twitter users keep their roasters at a permanent low heat in case of just such an event.
Not to mention pointing out the hypocrisy of Trump even celebrating the moment at all.
The Irish prime minister one-upped everyone on Twitter by getting a rare in-person own of the commander-in-chief.
A president who did “love to read,” as Trump claims, would have probably hired people who understand the fundamental, elementary-school importance of spelling things correctly. But then, this is also a president for whom lying is a basic, guilt-free function of existence, and a man who speaks at a sixth-grade reading level, a 70-year-old man with the emotional and intellectual maturity of a 10-year-old. What’s scarier than the theory that he doesn’t know how to read is the fact that he does know how—he just fucking hates it.