Trump Won't Do His Homework - And It Shows

(The image at right is by Sally Edelstein at envisioningtheamericandream.com.)

We know that Donald Trump is not a full-time president. He spends his mornings watching cable news (especially Fox News) and tweeting. That's probably a good thing, because the less he works, the less he can screw things up.

We also know that he's not the smartest person to hold that office. One of his teachers called him the dumbest student he had ever tried to teach.

But even a part-timer and slow learner could improve themselves with hard work. Unfortunately, that doesn't describe Trump either. He fails to do his "homework", so he just wings it when he faces the press or his crowds -- just saying what he would like to be true.

The following is from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg.com:

President Donald Trump outdid himself in Thursday’s press conference with an extended riff on miracle cures for the coronavirus that ended with a suggestion that maybe injecting disinfectant into the body would do the trick. (Disclaimer: Do not try this at home. No, really.) It seems destined to go down as the “inject bleach” speech, although he didn’t actually use those words. 

There’s a clip circulating of Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the coronavirus task force, reacting in resigned disbelief as Trump launches into this digression. It was astonishing in a sense. But also: par for the course. Birx is every trade expert when Trump talks tariffs, every health-policy expert when he talks health care, every defense expert when he talks about the military. He combines uncanny confidence with a total lack of knowledge on topic after topic. 

To listen to him in his briefings and other appearances is to hear howler after howler if one has a reasonable grasp of politics and government. The U.S. military, he says, was out of ammunition when he became president. NATO allies owe us money because they’re behind on their dues. Trade deficits are simply unilateral transfers of money from one nation to another. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what “pre-existing conditions” means, even though I’ve heard him discuss the topic dozens of times.

All presidents enter the White House with significant gaps in their knowledge of public policy. Every modern one has worked reasonably hard or very hard to catch up. Trump by all accounts (including his own) instead watches hours of cable news every day. As I’ve said, there’s nothing wrong with presidents monitoring the media, even though they have much better sources of information. It’s a good way to get outside the White House bubble and understand what other people are hearing. But Trump appears to use cable news as a substitute, not a supplement, to basic briefings.

All of which gets us to the worst moment of Trump’s Thursday session. After a discussion of whether the pandemic might prove to be seasonal, a reporter asked him: “If there is a summer sort of ebb with this virus, what would the federal government need to do to take advantage of that time to be better prepared for a possible resurgence in the fall than we were the first time?” Trump didn’t even appear to understand the question. At first, all he could come up with was, “I think a lot of people are going to go outside all of a sudden.” Then he got distracted and talked about a lab he thought was impressive. Then, when the reporter repeated the question, he looked stumped and asked Vice President Mike Pence to step in.

That's a pretty basic question. And Trump’s confused answer underlines the extent to which he is still, even now, disengaged from any real planning to control the pandemic and revive the economy. Perhaps he realized that talking about preparations for the fall might contradict his insistence that the federal response is perfect right now. But even then it’s shocking that he didn't have some kind of prepared answer for a question that’s so central to the crisis. 

Yes, there’s a long history of presidents who deliberately or otherwise sound worse in public than they do in private. It is possible Trump is part of that tradition. Unfortunately, his own staffers regularly tell reporters that he’s no better in private than he is in public. It’s hard to do a good job as president if you don’t do your homework. And watching hours of cable news won’t cut it.