The Elementary Education of Donald Trump
In a Sirius Radio interview on Monday, May 01, 2017, Donald Trump offered journalist Salena Zito some (at best) puzzling commentary regarding his opinion about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War:
I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?
Trump’s bizarre philosophical waxing produced ample media response, including this NPR piece in which journalist Miles Parks asks NPR Morning Edition Host Steve Inskeep, who wrote a book on Jackson, to offer his own commentary on Trump’s words.
In short, Inskeep reveals a Jacksonian-era knowledge level that escapes Donald Trump.
In a more searing response, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Washington Post journalist George Will bulls-eyes the situation with his observation that Trump “does not know what it is to know something”:
What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history. As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.
Will alludes to the two years that Trump spent Ivy-Leaguing it at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, from which he graduated in 1968. However, as New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz so cleverly captures in his satire entitled, “Fourth-Grade Class Touring White House Answers Trump’s Questions About the Civil War,” learning about the Civil War (and about the order of the presidents and when they lived) are a commonly-acknowledged part of American education gained in elementary school.
Let me also offer the following observation:
Had a current public school student offered Trump’s same words regarding Andrew Jackson’s purportedly saying that there was “no reason” for the Civil War and also The Elementary Education of Donald Trump | deutsch29:
