Donald Trump, History Dunce

Donald Trump keeps telling us that his war in Iran is “on schedule.” In one sense, he’s right: it’s on schedule to be dumber, more chaotic, and more expensive than George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

No one with a sense of history would have launched such an idiotic war—which perfectly explains why Trump did it.

The depths of Trump’s historical ignorance became painfully obvious during his first term, when he presided over the worst pandemic since 1918—or, as he insisted on calling it, the worst pandemic since 1917. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say, the great pandemic,” he said. “It certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people, probably ended the Second World War.” Probably not: the pandemic was over by 1920, and the Second World War didn’t begin until 1939.

When it comes to history, Trump’s most common errors involve (1) when events happened, and (2) what happened. On only his twelfth day as president, during a breakfast to kick off Black History Month, Trump gave Americans a sense that they hadn’t elected Robert Caro. With his only Black cabinet member, Dr. Ben Carson, at his side, he said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Given what an amazing job Fred is doing these days, it seemed a glaring omission that Trump hadn’t invited him to the breakfast.

Three months later, when Trump spoke about the president he claimed was his favorite, Andrew Jackson, he revealed confusion about when Jackson was alive. “He was really angry that—he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War,” Trump said of Old Hickory, who, for sixteen years before the Civil War began, had been Dead Hickory.

Trump’s most surreal mash-up of historical periods, however, occurred during a Fourth of July speech in 2019, when he offered this time-bending narrative of the Revolutionary War: “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.” People were so distracted by the image of eighteenth-century airports—did they have Sbarro back then, too?—that most overlooked the fact that the battle of Fort McHenry occurred during the War of 1812.

In his first term, Trump sometimes placed himself at the center of events in which he’d played no role, or which never happened at all. He claimed repeatedly that he’d been named Michigan’s Man of the Year; no such award exists. On more than 150 occasions he took credit for signing a health-care law called Veterans Choice. Such a law does exist, but it was signed, in 2014, by Barack Obama.

Just as Trump supported moving the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he seemed to believe that the birthplace of the American Revolution should be relocated from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. “You know how famous Concord is? Concord—that’s the same Concord that we read about all the time, right? Concord,” he informed puzzled members of a Granite State audience.

Trump’s ignorance of geography, however, makes Sarah Palin look like a “Jeopardy” champion. “After I had won, everybody was calling me from all over the world,” he said in 2017. “I never knew we had so many countries.”

That’s not all he didn’t know. He didn’t know the difference between England and Great Britain. He didn’t know that the Republic of Ireland wasn’t part of the UK. As for non-geographical facts about the country whose airports we seized in the 1700s, he didn’t know that Britain possessed nuclear weapons, nor did his White House know how to spell the first name of Prime Minister Theresa May. Trump staffers misspelled it “Teresa” three times before someone must have checked Wikipedia.

It’s often been said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In Trump’s case, those who didn’t learn history that’s taught in second grade should be forced to repeat second grade.

Even More Ignorance!

Today’s post was adapted from my book, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb & Dumber, the #1 bestseller at Bookshop. org. Today is the FINAL DAY to get it for 15% off by using promo code BSO15. And here’s the best part: all purchases made at TBR Bookshop help support local bookstores and not Jeff Bezos.