Stupidity appendix update

A few weeks ago I got the idea of adding an appendix to my stupidity book, which would just be a list of various stupid things Donald Trump has said and done during his presidencies, with maybe a couple of particularly choice examples from the Before Time thrown in for emphasis. I ran this past my Michigan football board people, who thought it was great (People love lists! You will be the Suetonius of the Trümpenabfall.) So then I bounced it off you all, and you came up with dozens of great suggestions that I hadn’t considered or had erased from my memory via protective repression.

I spent about a week immersing myself in all this, and now I have a draft, which consists of 108 specific examples, organized topically, with hyperlinks. Reading the whole thing straight through may cause either brain damage or projectile vomiting or both, so there should probably be some kind of FDA warning except we don’t really have an FDA any more oh well. I wrote a very brief introduction to the list, that makes a point about the whole “the media are in the tank with their sanewashing of Trump,” which is something I emphasize in the book, but which constructing this list emphasized to me is a valid point that has some significant limitations. Here’s the intro:

Malevolence, corruption, cruelty, ignorance, and stupidity are all inter-related in various ways.  As Margaret Atwood observed, “stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”  The following radically incomplete list of stupid things that Donald Trump has said and done tries to focus as much as possible on Trump’s stupidity per se, although that quality is inevitably a central element of his malevolence, corruption, cruelty, and ignorance, which are therefore necessarily on display here as well. 

This is a terrifying list, made all the more so by its countless omissions.  Yet note that every incident I chronicle here was covered, often in some depth, by America’s mainstream news media, in both its elite and more popular forms.  I suggest in this book that the media’s sanewashing of Trump has played a significant role in his rise to power.  Nevertheless, a list like this one also emphasizes that anyone who is interested in learning about Trump’s uncountable destructive stupidities doesn’t have to search far to find them elaborately chronicled in easily accessible sources.  And that is perhaps the most frightening thing about it.

Yes, the media sanewash Trump all the time, and that’s real bad and has real bad effects in the world. But . . . it’s not like it’s not all out there. It is, for anybody who wants to look. Hopefully this bit of curation will help a little in that regard.

I’ll just add a couple of things here.

Special thanks to whoever alerted me to Trump’s appearance on Howard Stern with two of his idiot children, where the three of them couldn’t successfully multiply seventeen and six. Trump was so insistent that he had the correct answer that he almost convinced Stern for a minute there. This little incident is symptomatic of so many things. (Side point: I can see two shortcuts to do this calculation: Multiplying 20 by six, then six by three, then subtracting the latter from the former. Multiplying ten by six, then six by seven, the adding the two figures. Which would you use or would you use some other shortcut? I use the former without really considering alternatives).

Another incident that seems particularly symptomatic:

Tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama, even though NOAA did not actually list Alabama as being under any threat.   Over the next week Trump kept insisting that his comment had been accurate.  He eventually showed reporters a weather map that had been altered with a black sharpie marker to show the hurricane’s track threatening Alabama.  “Sharpiegate” concluded with Trump getting NOAA to issue an unsigned statement saying that NHC models “demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama.”  https://www.reuters.com/article/world/sharpie-gate-trump-shows-apparently-altered-hurricane-map-idUSKCN1VQ01D/

Why can’t he ever be wrong? Why can’t he ever let anything go? Why is he so incredibly petty about everything, to go along with the stupidity and cruelty and ignorance and corruption?

Thanks again to everyone for your help.