When I listen to Trump talk, like on the White House lawn on the way to his helicopter, I often think back to someone I used to do business with during my working days. Sometimes there would be a problem, and I couldn't or wouldn't do what her company wanted me to do. I'd of course explain why. An hour or a day or a week later, depending on the urgency of the matter, I'd get a call from one of her confused colleagues. Could I explain the issue? So I would, the person would immediately understand, and the issue would get resolved.
After this had happened a few times, I formed a theory about what was going on. Notwithstanding her confidence and polished manner, the woman was a dope. She had no understanding of the subject matter of our shared work world. Consequently, she never comprehended the issue, whatever it was. Since she didn't understand anything, she'd try to memorize my words. When she got back to the office, she'd repeat what she'd memorized, but it would be off by enough to be confusing, incoherent, or in some way dubious. That's when my phone would ring, or a new message would pop into my in-box. To test the theory, I started supplying her with brief written memos she could take with her back to the office. Problem solved.
Yesterday, when Trump was taking questions from reporters while standing outside the White House with his soon-to-be ex-Secretary of Labor, he said, while answering a question about his executive authority:
It's a thing called Article 2. Nobody ever mentions Article 2. It gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.
We are all like the non-morons back at the office wondering what he was really told. It's certain that he was briefed about the abstruse "Article 2," the section of the Constitution concerning presidential powers. It would bear on questions like what he could accomplish by executive order after the Supreme Court rules against him. He was right, therefore, to bring up "Article 2" in answering a question about his prerogatives as president. But everything else is wrong. Maybe his briefer failed to mention that it's Article 2 of the US Constitution, or maybe he just forgot that part, or maybe he doesn't know that lots of people know about the US Constitution, what it says, and that it was ratified in the 18th-century. Who knows? "Article 2, Article 2, a thing called Article 2"--he's dropping work lingo without understanding what everyone in the biz knows. The mysterious "Article 2" isn't at all mysterious and it doesn't give him "all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before." It gives him the same powers it has given to every president since the United States has been the United States.
He's such an idiot! Who hired him?
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