Is the US in a post-literate presidency?
Today America is dangerously adrift at home and disconnected from the allies abroad
aping the former reality star’s attacks on the special counsel. Despite their desperate declarations that the Vietnam war hero is dragging his feet, Robert Mueller III has proved himself ruthlessly efficient in rooting out public corruption.
In just the past two months, the president’s first national security adviser and most trusted travelling companion pleaded guilty to federal charges. Trump’s campaign manager through the Republican National Convention was also arrested, charged and released only after posting $10 million (Dh36.7 million) in bail. A man Trump identified as one of his top foreign policy advisers has also pleaded guilty in federal court and is cooperating with the feds. Another Trump campaign aide was charged in a 12-count indictment. And with the release of Fire and Fury, we now know that yet another campaign official for the Republican president — one who subsequently served in his White House — believes that close Trump advisers were “treasonous” to meet with Russians during the campaign.
A cancer again is growing on the presidency, and few know whether the 45th president will survive a single term. An email Wolff describes as “purporting to represent the views” of chief economic adviser Gary Cohn neatly summarises what campaign workers and White House staff have been telling me about Trump for two years. He is an “idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos”.
Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question. “Can you read?” Awkward silence. “I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a onepage paper on a policy, could you read it?”
Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.
“Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to… He was post-literate — total television.” But Fire and Fury reveals that White House staff and Cabinet members believed Trump’s intellectual challenges went well beyond having a limited reading list: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot”, Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander-in-chief was a “moron”.
America is a nation that spent the past 100 years inventing the modern age, winning the First World War, defeating Hitler and winning the Second World War, and liberating half of Europe by beating the Soviets in the Cold War. But today we find ourselves dangerously adrift at home and disconnected from the allies abroad that made so many of those triumphs possible.
The world wonders how the US will survive Trump. And I ask, what will finally move Republicans to deliver a nonnegotiable ultimatum to this unstable president? Will they dare place their country’s interests above their own political fears? Or will they only move to end this American tragedy when there is nothing left to lose?
Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Congressman from Florida, hosts the MSNBC show Morning Joe.
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