Donald Trump spoke today, presumably in response to massive demonstrations across the country against racism and police brutality. Someone decided this would be a good time to make a pitch for school choice. Robert Shepherd, author and editor, transcribed Trump’s remarks and added his own commentary.
Here, in his typical toddler English, our part-time president in the orange clown makeup, IQ45, struggles, today, to remember an Ed Deform slogan:
“We’re fighting for school choice, which is really the civil rights [long pause, weird face; he can’t recall the word and finally just leaves it out] of all time in this country. Frankly, school choice is the civil rights [pause; he still can’t find the word] statement [sic] of the year, [he realizes he made a ridiculous gaffe in saying that this was the most important issue of all time; there was, for example, the matter of slavery] of the decade, and probably beyond because all children have to have access to a quality education. A child’s ZIP code in America [as opposed to her ZIP Code in Sri Lanka?] should never determine their [sic] future, and that’s what was happening, so we’re very, very strong on school choice, and I hope everybody remembers that, and it’s happening. [What’s happening? Who knows.] It’s already happening. We have tremendous opposition from people that [sic] know they shouldn’t be opposing it. [These people who oppose it are just perverse. LOL.] School. [pause] Choice. [He says it as though he’s just recently learned the term and expects that other people have never heard it before either. LOL.] All children deserve equal opportunity because we are all made equal by God. So true. [said as if a comment on something a speech he was advised to make, which it probably was.] A great jobs market and thriving economy is [sic] probably the best thing [sic] we can do to help the black, Hispanic, Asian communities.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
An uneducated man pontificates about education. A racist man pontificates about racism.
As Diane Ravitch wrote, “No, Donnie. Civil rights is the civil rights issue of our time.”
Everything the idiot says screams that he JUST DOESN’T GET IT.
I have flying squirrels outside tonight getting into my bird feeders. I think the logging behind my place chased them out. They have a high-pitched twitter. I wonder how Bob would transcribe their noise.
Speaking of noise, I remember reading about something in mathematics called the F-noise. It had to do with chaos theory and iterative functions, but that is all I recall. Maybe random noise is Trump’s real intention.
It’s tempting, I know, to attribute method to his madness, and he does go in heavily for distraction. Despite his cognitive deficits, he does have a low cunning in some matters. But I suspect that this is SIMPLY madness, sans method.
well said
I am an elementary teacher and love getting help an advice from people who research and study education. This is something I would hear and see from children when they can’t agree. Name-calling, references to how smart each other is, and the forbidden appearance and body shaming. We are not that, we as teachers that strive to help students be kind, say kind things, and resolve our issues with respect and kindness. I appreciate educational advice from experts, however, comments like this “Here, in his typical toddler English, our part-time president in the orange clown makeup, IQ45, ” is not relevant and discredits what teachers are trying to do in the classroom. It reflects back and makes us sound exactly what we are complaining about. Would you make comments to a student like this about another student to solve an issue? No. I want to hear from you but keep facts facts and opinions just that an opinion. We are here to teach, help, and enlighten. Please be kind and find a way to say your words in a more respectful way. I will tell you the golden rule in my class that I say to my 5th graders. Do and say unto others as you want to be done and said unto you.
We are all adults here.
“Name-calling, references to how smart each other is, and the forbidden appearance and body shaming. ”
H-m-m. Sounds like someone we know. You are right, though, Rhonda. In our anger and disgust with DT, we too often end up using the same tactics DT uses to belittle his opponents. Frustration?
Let me ask you, Rhonda. Do you think that adults should have tempered their language MORE when Hitler was seizing Germany? Do you think they should have been NICER when discussing the brownshirts in the streets beating Jews and breaking the windows in their shops? Trump is the man (I use the term loosely) who has violated every social norm, who stands accused of multiple rapes over a lifetime, who abandons our allies to be slaughtered, who refers to Nazis and anti-Nazis as the “good people on both sides,” who suggests that refugees seeking asylum should be shot, who steals children from their parents and locks them in cages, who takes free lunches and breaksfasts from over a million poor children, who gets rid of the regulations that protect kids from lead paint poisoning, who just proposed that asylum laws no longer protect those fleeing domestic abuse or “specific groups” such as cartels or gangs subjecting them to violence.
Yes, we must take extreme care to protect children from such language, but among adults, social sanction, for good and ill, is a POWERFUL force for effecting change. Trump and his vile ilk should have been laughed off the national stage long ago.
cx: breakfasts
Lass dich umarmen!
Thank you, Greg. Same.
I misspoke. Trump did more than “suggest” that refugees at our Southern border be shot. He screamed at and belittled his Secretary for Homeland Security (“Honey,” he called her) because she told him that she couldn’t legally follow his directive to shoot refugees.
He seriously wanted our Border Patrol officers to shoot refugees, and he was furious when told that he couldn’t order them to do that. And he was likewise furious when Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley refused to let him turn the U.S. military on U.S. citizens, which led former SecDef James Mattis to write his letter denouncing Trump in the following language: “We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”
Yes, we all wish for a return to civility in our civil discourse. This will not happen until Jabba the Trump and Propaganda Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Miller are out of the now Offal Office in the now Whiter House. They need to be called out for what they are. It is my sincere hope that they will both end up standing in the dock at the International Court of Criminal Justice charged with crimes against humanity.
“Here, in his typical toddler English, our part-time president in the orange clown makeup, IQ45,”
He’s a part-time president. He spends a lot of his ‘executive time’ watching Fox so he can get ideas on how to think.
“I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf.” –Donald J. Trump, August, 2016
Cost to Taxpayer: About $136,000,000 for his golfing trips. Daytime visits to golf clubs since inauguration, with evidence of playing golf on at least 119 visits. Our last recorded outing was on June 14, 2020.
Have you ever read a sentence that Trump says? HE is the leader of this country and he can’t even speak in complete sentences that make sense. Is it toddler English…I’d say it is.
Trump describes a meeting with Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings:
“Well he said, you’ll be the greatest president in the history of, but you know what, I’ll take that also, but that you could be. But he said, will be the greatest president but I would also accept the other. In other words, if you do your job, but I accept that. Then I watched him interviewed and it was like he never even was here. It’s incredible. I watched him interviewed a week later and it’s like he was never in my office. And you can even say that.”
Trump made the unfortunate mistake of confusing the September 11 attacks with the convenience store 7/11.
While on the campaign trail in Buffalo, New York, in April, he said: ‘It’s very close to my heart because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I’ve ever seen in action.’
In another poorly phrased sentence, Trump claimed ‘we’re going to have more World Trade Centers’.
He said he would get rid of the ‘Department of Environmental’ because of its effect on business.
Trump lies relentlessly about his achievements and calls critics filthy names.
Tweet: ‘Lying Ted Cruz and leightweight chocker Marco Rubio teamed up last night in a last ditch effort to stop our great movement. They failed!’
Trump’s gibberish isn’t just unrecognizably stupid– it’s dangerous.
Forget vaccines and treatments. The very stable genius has a foolproof coronavirus cure.
“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” President Trump said at the White House on Monday.
Dana Milbank responds: “And if I stop weighing myself right now, I will gain very few pounds, if any.”
If Trump’s Labor Department asks states to stop the release of their unemployment claims until later, there will be very few jobless people, if any.
If the administration stops the public disclosure of recipients of the Paycheck Protection Program, there will be very few cases, if any, of waste, fraud and abuse.
Trump has evidently decided that if enough Americans are willing to suspend disbelief, there are few problems, if any, that can’t be solved by averting the public gaze.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/16/this-cure-pandemic-is-work-very-stable-genius/
“And if I stop weighing myself right now, I will gain very few pounds, if any.”
And if I stop weighing myself, I may lose? Please!? Sorry for the distraction.
Rhonda, I too am a public educator of early childhood education for almost 27 years. The child world is not completely the same as the adults world.
In this blog, we are ALL adults. We ain’t no disciples of Mother Teresa sitting around knitting doilies for the indigent.
This is class warfare, in case you have not noticed, and people are suffering horribly, which goes under-reported in this country.
This is a fight for justice, and fights for justice will not need a “Georgette Baxter” from the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
It will need, more like, a tough Robert DeNiro or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer to get into the active, animated, and vibrant moves and grooves of a political revolution.
Hopefully, it will endure as a peaceful revolution . . .
Rhonda, keep telling your students about the golden rule; I agree with it. But as they age and become adults (this is largely THEIR future, Rhonda!), they won’t be too hard pressed to be polite and mind their manners and passions when they won’t be able to buy a home, attend college, or get treated by a doctor . . .
Rhonda, our cause and this blog are NOT the Disney Channel . . . Reader be advised.
Bob deserves combat pay for transcribing this idiocy. (Education combat pay is waaaay lower than minimum wage!)
I agree. I just did a version of the T’s nonsense without Bob’s comments. What remains is seriously defective thinking, word salad.
Salad has nutritional value. It’s more like word manure. No. Manure has value too. It’s really thought poison.
Yes to you both. The British call it shite.
“so we’re very, very strong on school choice”
I didn’t mention, above, Trump’s unique use of the royal “we.” This is a tic of his, a common usage for him. In another president, the “we” would, ofc, simply refer to the administration as a whole, to an official position taken by that administration. But in Trump’s case, it is a tell. Trump is phenomenally stupid and ignorant. He has, as James Mattis put it, “the understanding of a fifth- or sixth-grader.” And so people around Trump tell him things, and these are a big revelation to him, and something sinks in, and he decides to repeat it because he thinks it might help him, and it comes out as “we” because these words were just put into his tiny brain by one of the people in his immediate circle. He’s not an articulate person, and he struggles with subtleties of any kind. I know that there are all kinds of problems with IQ tests, but I suspect that if Trump took one today, he would score in the low 70s.
Trump trying to block Bolton memoir. That will help sales.
I’m ambivalent about this. Don’t care what either the Idiot or Bolton “thinks” or says. The Idiot is a traitor who deserves the constitutional solution. Bolton is an opportunistic coward. Both deserve a special place in hell, should it exist.
I think Trump’s words about school choice is nothing more than the reworking of what Bush said so many years ago about “No Child Left Behind.” “No Child Left Behind” with its standardized testing and irresponsible teacher accountability did not work for Bush. Trump use of words for political votes will not work either. American Students and Education System will continue to be the losers.
I think Trump has gout. That explains why he’s limping around. Probably more extreme, because of bone spur history. Disrupts thinking. Maybe limits use of thumbs and curbs tweeting. Still he is willing to tough it out. Plays golf through the pain. Takes courage that we need to face virus unmasked. But now he can understand how some blacks feel and why school choice is the solution.
“Plays golf though the pain.” Thank him for his sacrifice. 🙄
Only public schools have the talent to innovate. Choice is just game playing. Doing the same old thing with poorer results while manipulating their fake outcomes.
Only public schools have the talent to innovate. Choice is just game playing. Doing the same old thing with poorer results while manipulating their fake outcomes.
Trump’s Epitaph:
Here 45 finally lies.
Died of Exhaustion
Too much Extortion
Contortion, Distortion.
Well said, Fred!
Another possible epitaph occurs to me.
Here lies Donald Trump.
But that’s nothing new.
Liked your opening words better than mine.
Call the monument maker. I would change my words on the stone to reflect the coroner’s report:
Died of Exhaustion
Too Much Self-Absorption
Aggressive Extortion
Massive Distortion
(Bob, we should invite readers of this blog to come up with their own epitaphs… What think?)
Caused how many abortions?
Bob,
Good epitaph!!
This is off topic, but it shows what a Catholic high school in Boise, Idaho is planning to do for graduation. [Bishop Kelly High school is not far from Borah High, a public school from which I graduated.]
The governor allows gatherings of 50 people. The mayor of Boise limited the number of people gathering to 250 but Bishop Kelly is having around 1,200 at the graduation. Don’t these people in charge care about the lives of either the graduates or their friends or relatives?
……………………………………………….
This Boise high school plans to violate city order with a 1,200-person graduation [Bishop Kelly High School]
JUNE 17, 2020 02:24 PM
Boise Mayor Lauren McLean issued an order last week that limits gatherings to 250 people, but Bishop Kelly High School is planning a graduation Saturday that could have nearly 1,200 people present.
And the city of Boise appears unlikely to do anything about it.
The Catholic high school announced Monday that it would hold an “almost traditional graduation ceremony” based on Idaho moving into Stage 4 of Gov. Brad Little’s plan to free Idaho from its coronavirus lockdown. Little’s guidelines, issued June 11, allow for gatherings of more than 50 people, with no upper limit, as long as attendees can remain socially distant…
Boise Mayor Lauren McLean issued an order last week that limits gatherings to 250 people, but Bishop Kelly High School is planning a graduation Saturday that could have nearly 1,200 people present.
And the city of Boise appears unlikely to do anything about it.
The Catholic high school announced Monday that it would hold an “almost traditional graduation ceremony” based on Idaho moving into Stage 4 of Gov. Brad Little’s plan to free Idaho from its coronavirus lockdown. Little’s guidelines, issued June 11, allow for gatherings of more than 50 people, with no upper limit, as long as attendees can remain socially distant.
But McLean issued a public health order, also on June 11 and effective last Saturday, June 13, imposing a stricter limit for Boise. She prohibited gatherings larger than 250 people. That means Bishop Kelly’s graduation, even with distancing measures the school has proposed, would violate the order.
McLean plans no enforcement, though she says she pointed out the limit to a Bishop Kelly representative.
“Although group gatherings of over 250 are prohibited in the city of Boise in Stage 4, the city of Boise remains focused on education first,” McLean told the Idaho Statesman by email. “We ask event organizers to please follow the state and city’s reopening guidelines and practice safe physical distancing, urge the use of face coverings and good hygiene.”..
Read more here: https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/article243581547.html?#storylink=cpy
https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/article243581547.html
I agree that we all need to call out Trump. However, especially in this time of reflection, I think we need to be aware of pervasive societal predujice, especially towards people with disabilities. Donald Trump is an evil, racist human being. To think that it is okay to associate those traits with people with intellectual disabilities, especially from a forum directed at educators is disheartening. As a special educator who works with students with ID, I find it offensive to mention IQ in a way that links people with disabilities to the venal acts of Donald Trump and hope in the future we won’t discuss IQ being associated with performance.
Is it ok to call him an idiot?
Can we agree on a malicious idiot?
Thank you for the reminder, Tandra. I worked with young people in special education with a wide range of IQ scores, and I can’t imagine ever using those scores as a way to denigrate them.