What Donald Trump doesn’t know

| 10:50 pm EDT April 1, 2020
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Dame Edith Sitwell once put it this way, “I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.” We now live in an epoch where the subject of that observation by that particular celebrated crosspatch probably reminds the average intelligent person of Donald Trump. That may be a historic first. Trump is quite possibly the most famous stupid person in all of history — and proud of it. What makes him so particularly unusual is that almost every fool on earth loves him. (Fools are frequently disliked by other fools.)

Nevertheless, when Trump says he knows more about a topic than anyone else, be prepared for a spectacular verbal pratfall. Trump rarely disappoints. When, for example, Trump told PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, “I know South Korea better than anybody,” he then went on to prove that he didn’t. He didn’t even know that Seoul had a population of 9.8 million. He said it had a population of 38 million. Could it be that he meant “greater Seoul,” that is, the population of the city combined with the outlying suburbs? No, that has a population of 25 million.

An interesting phenomenon has been pointed out by political commentators Brian Tyler Cohen and David Packman. If you google “South Korea” it returns the pertinent information, among other things, “Elevation: 38 m (125 ft).” Did Trump google the city and, in his casual haste, confuse 38 m(eters) with 38 m(illion) and assume it applied to the size of the population? Is that how he got the population wrong by a factor of four? It’s an intriguing possibility. If true, it’s also a stunning mistake. Trump makes a lot of them.

It’s also apparent that Trump doesn’t understand what “per capita” means. When Ms. Alcindor pointed out that South Korea had a much higher rate of coronavirus testing per capita than the United States, Trump went on to suggest (or even prove) that he didn’t understand what “per capita” means, by telling her that the population of the United States is spread out over a large area, but that America had done more testing per capita than any country on earth. That is simply not so. The United States has performed fewer coronavirus tests than any significant country on earth— per capita. In the most prosperous and wealthy nation in the world that fact reverberates to the enduring infamy of this child rapist and his pirate ship regime.

In the ensuing week to ten days America’s woeful and shamefully poor testing history will have diminishing relevance anyway. By contrast, it was because the South Koreans were able to perform so many COVID-19 tests and isolate quickly those patients who tested positive, that they were able to dramatically curtail the spread of the disease on the peninsula. Trump’s pestilential, half-witted, inconsistent policies have ensured that America will get maximally hit with the infection. That he has shown obvious and provable favoritism by supplying red states with more masks and ventilators than blue states is also a crime against humanity. Trump should go to prison for life for that crime alone. That he is supremely stupid proves he should have never been president of the United States in the first place.