David Pakman sure seems to think so…
…and he’s got me wondering as much, myself.
Now, I’m not sure who “the Canadian police” he’s referring to are. Is it a police force in a specific Canadian city, e.g. Toronto? A provincial police force, such as the OPP? Or the RCMP, which operates on a federal level (and also serves remote locations and municipalities too small to afford their own police forces)? It could be the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. The document he’s referring to appears to be this one here.
Anyhow.
He’s quite right that Drumpf gives the impression of being barely literate, if not functionally illiterate. He (Drumpf, not Pakman!) acts confused, often befuddled, and seems to be trying desperately to cover it up, when asked to read something. He makes a lot of transparent excuses (the “glasses” one being the most obvious: when has anyone seen him wearing glasses, even cheap drugstore reading glasses, ever?) And the fact that Drumpf has been ever keen to sell himself as a master dealmaker, even after repeated bankruptcies and losses in the billions, certainly reeks of a cover-up, too. Something even his monstrous ego can’t quite stretch far enough to hold in.
Now, no one is saying that a POTUS has to be the smartest person in the world. They don’t have to be a genius (although I’m sure a higher-than-most degree of intelligence doesn’t hurt!) They don’t have to be in possession of multiple doctorates. Some, in fact, have remarkably little formal schooling! So we’re not talking intellectual gigantism here. We’re not even talking about the kind of hyperliteracy demanded of an Ivy League law grad, either. We’re talking about a basic, functional degree of literacy. The kind required for most joe jobs. Or to read and memorize the Gettysburg Address. Does he even have that?
Frighteningly, the answer appears to be NO. He doesn’t even have the patience to mouth along with a hymn sheet in church, as the video above indicates. Something like that would require basic literacy. He might be bored out of his skull, he might not even know how to fake the tune…but he could at least mouth the words. He doesn’t.
And there is evidence that he doesn’t even read the executive orders he signs — the ones drafted not by himself, but by Steve Fucking Bannon, his white-supremacist chief of staff. The one who actually finagled himself the position by making it an executive order, and then handing it to Drumpf to scribble his illegible John Hancock under. Drumpf sure does like to make a show of parading his ability to sign papers…but anyone can do that. Even a little kid who doesn’t know how to print, never mind write cursive, will do it. Or at least go convincingly through the motions of doing it.
Unfortunately, being a little kid in a big man’s suit is not presidential. Merely looking the part isn’t enough. To govern a country, you have to be competent enough to at least read whatever the hell you’re signing off on. And that’s a bare minimum. A person who can’t even manage that isn’t fit for the post, and must be removed from office before any more damage can be done.
And in Drumpf’s case, a great deal of damage has been done already.
