I promise you, I am really trying not to post about Trump. Some articles, however, are too compelling to pass up. This is one of them.
The latest Trump interview once again reveals appalling ignorance and dishonesty – Vox
https://apple.news/Ak-YKQ5ZJR6OLq0yvVV_LDw
Diane Ravitch's blog 
He needs to have some cognitive function tests. He is being protected by aides and by Republicans who know he is incompetent and really dangerously impulsive.
LikeLike
Isn’t it astonishing that he thinks he invented the term “priming the pump”? I learned that in middle school.
LikeLike
My grandfather’s farmhouse had a real pump that needed to be primed. I learned how to prime it in elementary school.
LikeLike
I would think it easy to appear a fast learner when one knows little – or nothing! Any learning, however small, would represent exponential growth when compared to the initial intellectual state.
LikeLike
This man is going to be led off, in the dark of the night, by Ivanka and Jared saying, “I’m smart, aren’t I? Tell them I’m really, really smart.”
LikeLike
Half way in, it hurt my brain. My brain hurts from reading the gobbledygook. Taking aspiring; going to bed to rest my brain. Trump is a loon. #ImpeachTrump
LikeLike
He’s insane, incoherent, an absolute disaster. It gets worse every day. I can’t stand it. I will never forgive my big brother for voting for him.
LikeLike
Be careful with the word “insane”. It is solely a legal term and it has to do with culpability for one’s behavior. I don’t think we want to be arguing that Trump isn’t culpable for his behavior.
LikeLike
Trump is psycho…period. He is unstable and illiterate. Put him in a padded cell.
LikeLike
Oh, but don’t worry ladies and gentlemen, Hillary would have been so much worse. So calm down, relax and enjoy our collective Hillarylessness. (sarcasm alert) Don’t blame me, I voted for Hillary in the general election.
Trump is a blithering knuckle head. We can only hope that he doesn’t involve us in more wars of occupation, a la Bush #2. I absolutely do not yearn for Bush #2 or the Bush #2 years.
LikeLike
How did this happen to us? I can even say the man’s name.
LikeLike
HI Linda…this happened to us because of various things. But let’s start with the TRASH we do not need.
First, we do NOT need the Electoral College nor the DNC and the RNC. We only need a popular vote with one month of free media electioneering. That would immediately get rid of Citizens United and get tainted cash out of our political system.
Second, we need strong civics education starting in grade school, so all students can learn what our system is about, and why it developed as it did, and how to be an effective citizen.
Third, we need to set aside all the tech crap that keeps too many of us engrossed in looking away from each other, and not being kind or civilized. We need to actually learn to talk to each other while looking to each other’s eyes, and being polite and courteous, and using non-foul language. NO tweets, NO texts, NO 3 word emails.
Fourth, we need an economic system that serves 100% of our American residents/citizens, and not only the top 20%, with those in the top 1% owning most of the wealth or our nation. And we need single payer universal health care so we all have the same ability to stay healthy.
Fifth, we need the greedy shallow entertainment industry to stop portraying murder and mayhem as fun. That goes for video games, films, TV, music.
Sixth, we need to train and nurture candidates to represent us to be ethical people, and that means they reject all lobbyist cash and promises. And this is one I could write on for the next two hours.
I have lots more, but will stop here.
LikeLike
Yes x 6.
LikeLike
Ellen A giant bravo!! Well said.
LikeLike
Yes, Ellen, we need a focus on democratic citizenship in our schools.
And that cannot be simply a content focus, it has to be inquiry and discussion-based. It has to examine and analyze and evaluate what it means to be a citizen in a democratic republic that is ostensibly based on popular sovereignty, equality, justice, freedoms for all citizens, tolerance, and promoting the general welfare of the nation.
We need not concern ourselves with ACTs, and SATs, and Advanced Placement, and STEM. These are distractors from what matters most.
How did Trump happen?
We have lots of people – and one particular party – who have no commitment whatsoever to the Constitution, though they love to wrap themselves in the flag.
We have – and this is no overstatement – a real constitutional crisis on our hands.
LikeLike
From the Lester Holt interview with Agent Orange:
” ‘I know I’m not under investigation,’ Trump told Holt during the 31-minute White House interview…Trump added of the investigation, I want that to be so strong and so good. And I want it to happen.’…Asked by Holt if by firing Comey he was trying to send a ‘lay off’ message to his successor, Trump said, ‘I’m not. If Russia did anything, I want to know that,’ he said…But Trump also insisted there was no ‘collusion between me and my campaign and the Russians.’…It would be highly unusual for someone who might be the focus of an FBI probe to ask whether he was under investigation and to be directly told by the FBI director that he was not…legal experts told NBC News the president’s action was improper.”
“Trump, in his talk with Holt, contradicted Vice President Mike Pence’s account of how his boss came to his decision to fire Comey on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein…When asked if Pence too had been kept in the dark, White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders retorted ‘nobody was in the dark’ and accused the media of creating a ‘false narrative.’ ”
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-reveals-he-asked-comey-whether-he-was-under-investigation-n757821
These truly are the Mole People.
LikeLike
Excellent video narrated by Stephen Fry to help explain Trumpsters;
LikeLike
Nice video….but it offers little to combat the incessant lying from Agent Orange and from his administration, and from Fox.
And, as FiveThirtyEight reported yesterday, “before Trump entered the presidential race, CBS News found that 88 percent of Republicans, 86 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents had at least some confidence that their votes were counted properly. At the end of the 2016 campaign, a similar 86 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of independents had at least some confidence, but just 62 percent of Republicans did.”
Trump has now set up a ‘Voter Fraud Commission’ and placed Mike Pence in charge of it. Pence engaged in voter suppression in Indiana. The vice-chair of the commission is Kris Kobach, notorious for being an extremist, and a guy who’s been called openly racist and a “classic John Bircher-style nutcase.”
Two-thirds of Trumpsters think rampant voter fraud is real.
LikeLike
If there were good, effective ideas about combatting the incessant lying, they’d be known by now. What we have done a poor job of understanding why people follow. My guess is that 30 percent of the population are true believers. We need to figure out how to reach the rest of the 10-20 percent. This video, in my view, is a good tool for the arsenal.
LikeLike
Milton Rokeach laid out many of the reasons why there are Trumpsters in The Open and Closed Mind.
In essence, it boils down to dogmatism, close-mindedness. And that emanates from belief and disbelief systems. And that ties to critical thinking, and why it matters so much in education. And that relates to areas of controversy in American society, and democratic values, and debate and discussion, and the examination of beliefs and disbeliefs.
And all that takes time and is not easily captured by multiple choice tests or Advanced Placement courses.
It takes the kind of education advocated by John Dewey, and Hunt & Metcalf, and Smith & Hullfish, and John Goodlad.
LikeLike
“There are some vicious bigots, men of small brains and smaller hearts, men of more gall then blood.” Thomas Meagher
Trump and Gates are a lot alike. Both use words that hide and distort reality.
Gates talks about data driven solutions. But, that masks the goal of enrichment of tech tyrants and Wall Street. Last year, Puerto Rico got a Washington-based consultant as Secretary of Education. A governing board in New York put her in place after they took over the island. Hedge funds drove Puerto Rico into bankruptcy prompting New York’s governance. Austerity measures, derived from the spreadsheets that line the appointee’s office, drive the decisions. If better education or efficiency had anything to do with the plotting of the richest 0.1%, the first thing they would do is cut out the money going to Wall Street. The unfettered financial sector drags down GDP by an estimated 2%.
The oligarchs’ grand rhetoric about free markets, is the same, as the ruse England used to allow a million Irish to die of starvation.
Gates and Walton heirs brought their failed school privatization to Ohio, which became a multi-billion dollar boondoggle, with estimated truancy rates of 70%. The system made a handful of men rich. A student in the system told a reporter, “I can basically get up and work whenever I want.” Career ready? Where, on the spreadsheets of Gates’ Impatient Opportunists’, is truth? Nowhere.
LikeLike
Trump and Gates are a lot alike. Both use words that hide and distort reality.
Gates is smarter. He is richer. He is a reader. He thinks that wealth entitles him to tell others how to live.
But Gates is not as smart as he thinks he is. His small school initative crashed and burned because he misread the data in a report.
Both men are obsessed with making profits and gaining power.
LikeLike
When an animal behaviorist was asked which is smarter, dogs or cats. She said dogs are smarter at what they do and cats are smarter at what they do. Both Gates and Trump con people. I’ll give that win to Gates. He’s an oligarch who got the Medal of Freedom (or, as SDP quipped “fiefdom”). Others might say Trump wins because his creditors have been left holding the bag so often. Both minimize the taxes they pay
I presume Gates is better at quantitative subjects but, that’s cats vs. dogs. Fewer people in the population have quantitative skills. It’s a descriptor. Society’s judgement about a skill’s value is capricious.
For example, Gates on a desert island might not survive 3 days. The person who survives longer may be the “smarter ” one. Narrow subject savants are rare in the population. It doesn’t make them smarter
LikeLike
I’m not a fan of Bill Gates, or his “reforms.”
But Gates is a far different creature than Trump.
LikeLike
One proved ineffective and caused misery. The other used his patent-protected invention’s profits to buy policy implementation and caused misery?
One is egomaniacal and the other is narcissistic?
One undermines democracy and the other subverts democracy?
One thinks his family deserves privilege and the other thinks the same rules don’t apply to his family?
One thinks suckers pay taxes. The other one lives in the state where the poor pay taxes at a rate up to 7 times the rate that the rich pay?
One put himself in the political ring. The other funded efforts to unseat Washington state judges?
Or, were you referring to orange skin vs. flaky skin?
LikeLike
Good analysis, Linda.
LikeLike