TRUMP HAS BECOME, "KING OF THE FAUX PAS"!

…President Trump with the President of China, Xi Jinping

 

President Trump has committed many screw-ups since his inauguration. 

 

President Trump recounted his session at his Mar-a-Lago resort with Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Wall Street Journal saying,  “You know, I felt pretty strongly that they [China] had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think."  As usual, he had no details or an explanation for this final statement.

 

Apparently, President Xi tutored Trump on the history of the region and Trump says he fully understood the situation after only 10 minutes of discussion with the Chinese leader.

 

I find this comment very interesting and a real crock, since back in 2011, Trump claimed that he had read “hundreds of books about China over the decades,” including those by Henry Kissinger, American journalists and Chinese novelists such as Amy Chua.

 

Trump said he had done all this back then, as he was looking to do more business with Beijing.  He had even provided a list of 20 books about China to the official Chinese news agency.  Books that he said had helped him understand the country, its politics and its people. “I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind,” Trump had said.

 

His list had some surprising titles on it, including “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” .  This is a book by an American Chinese female attorney and author, and the book has to do with the contrast of an American Chinese mother, versus a traditional Chinese mother. 

 

First, I have a problem believing that Donald Trump read 20 books on the Chinese.  He gets virtually all his info about the world only from cable TV.  And for sure, I question that he ever read anything by Ms. Amy Chua.

 

If Trump read 20 books for learning about China, I guarantee you that the history of China with North Korea would have been included.  That is mainly because, hundreds of decades ago, North & South Korea were part of China.

 

North Korea would and could have never existed without China’s support.  China could stop North Korea in a heartbeat, just by turning off their supply of oil, natural gas and coal, as they are the sole supplier of these energy commodities.  Not to mention, China furnishes most of North Korea’s food sources.  Even the electronics for the North’s new ballistic missile systems comes indirectly from China.  In addition, thousands of those in North Korea have relatives in China that go back for many generations.

 

The fact that our new president needed a tutorial on China-Korean relations to understand how hard it is to contain Pyongyang, this is just the latest illustration that he and his advisers have very little sense of real history, especially the detailed histories of foreign Asian nations..

 

But this is just one of the many faux pas that our president has committed since his inauguration. 

 

And here are some of the others:

 

>>> Trump actually said the following at a fundraising dinner for the National Republican Congressional Committee: “Most people don't even know he [Lincoln] was a Republican,” Trump said. “Does anyone know? Lot of people don't know that!” Excuse me, but in this room full of Republican political donors, I would almost guarantee that virtually everyone in the room knew that the "Republican Party" was the “Party of Lincoln”, and I don’t mean Ford Motor Company’s “Lincoln”.

 

>>> You also probably didn’t know that on Lincoln’s birthday in February, Trump tweeted out a false quote that was supposed to have originally come from the 16th president: “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.” Trump later deleted the false quote.

 

>>> At a Black History Month event, Trump said: “I noticed that Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.”  (Sorry Donald, Frederick Douglass died in 1895.)

 

>>> At a Women’s History Month Reception he actually asked: “Have you people heard of Susan B. Anthony?”

 

>>> Trump had said that Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) – who is best known for almost being beaten to death as he marched on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama.  But Trump said Lewis: “is all talk, talk, talk - no action or results.” There are things Lewis could be criticized for, but no one who knows anything about Lewis and the civil rights movement would agree that being “all talk and no results” is not one of them.

 

>>> In Trump’s attitude to wholeheartedly embrace of the term “America First”, anyone else would have seriously looked into the history of that phrase before using it the way Trump does, including as the rallying cry at his inaugural speech.  Had he done that investigation, he would have realized that it was originally a slogan first popularized in the 1930’s by Nazi sympathizers.

 

>>> Trump has embraced Andrew Jackson as his political idol.  He has hung Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office and he flew to Nashville on Jackson’s 250th birthday to lay a wreath on his tomb.  He has also embraced Henry Clay, he said "Like Henry Clay, we want to put our own people to work. … Clay was a fierce advocate for American manufacturing.”

 

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with history knows how bizarre it is to embrace both Jackson and Clay together. “They were absolutely feral enemies," said Fergus Bordewich, a Clay biographer as he told Time Magazine after Trump’s speech about Jackson & Clay. "They absolutely hated each other. They shared almost no views in common.”

 

>>> Even Trump’s Press Secretary, Sean Spicer is just as bad as Trump about his lack of knowledge and sensitivity to history, even recent history. 

 

Spicer’s cringe-worthy comments that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s actions were worse than Adolf Hitler’s suggested a more basic problem of historical illiteracy throughout the White House.  Because Spicer made his comment on the first day of Passover, observant staff members at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had their phones and televisions turned off. They didn’t find out until the next day what had been said by Spicer.  Leaders of the ADL group then reached out to the White House to offer a training session on the Holocaust. The ADL stated: “The organization has taught classes on Hitler’s murderous campaign — which exterminated 6 million Jews and thousands of LGBTQ people & Poles, socialists and others.  We have taught more than 130,000 law enforcement professionals and 35,000 teachers,” Julie Zauzmer reports. The ADL offered a free session to Spicer or “anyone at the White House who may need to learn more about the Holocaust.” Of course, Spicer hasn’t respond as to whether he’ll do it.

 

>>> Trump has said he would like to read biographies on former presidents, but he never has the time.  He then explained that he really does not need to read extensively about them because he already always reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already have”.  Plus Trump uses the words ‘common sense, because I have a lot of common sense.” Trump told this directly to Marc Fisher of The Washington Post.  Trump says he is skeptical of historical experts because they can’t see the forest for the trees, and they lack his good instincts….whatever that means.

 

>>> Trump’s dark world view is one of the ways his lack of historical perspective presents itself. David Nakamura, a foreign correspondent for The Post contrasted how Obama and Trump see the world: “Addressing the United Nations last fall, Obama took a moment to highlight for fellow world leaders what he called ‘the most important fact’ about the state of global affairs: Human existence on planet Earth is good — and getting better. War is down, he said, while life expectancy is up. Democracy is on the march, and science has beaten back infectious diseases. A girl in a remote village can download the ‘entirety of human knowledge’ on a smartphone. A person born today, Obama concluded, is more likely to be safer, healthier, wealthier and better-educated — and to see a path to prosperity — than at ‘any time in human history.”

 

Unfortunately, President Trump does not live in the world that Mr. Nakamura, myself and Obama live in today.  To Trump, the world is, and I quote the president: “a mess,” as he said during a recent White House news conference. “It’s crazy what’s going on,” Trump said. “Whether it’s the Middle East or you look at — no matter where — the Ukraine — wherever you look, it’s got problems, so many problems. Right now, it’s very nasty.”

It is amazing that the major press and the main-stream media continue to not go after all the miss-statements and miss-perceptions of our current Commander-in-Chief.

 

Apparently, they are just waiting for him to self-destruct on his own.

 

It can’t be that they actually believe in the bizarre things that Trump says……or do they?

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017