Suffice to say that we know Steve Bannon
gave Trump a book about Jackson and the most generous reading of his comment is that he didn't get past the chapter on the
Nullification Crisis and confused it with the beginning of the civil war. It actually happened nearly 30 years previous and there were many attempts to "work it out" over decades as all of us who studied it in 8th grade already know. For all of his self-professed genius, it seems our president doesn't know anything about American history.
TRUMP: We are living in a time that's as evil as any time that there has ever been. You know, when I was a young man, I studied Medieval times. That's what they did, they chopped off heads. That's what we have ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: So we're going to chop off heads?
TRUMP: We're going to do things beyond waterboarding perhaps, if that happens to come.
Of course he got that wrong too,
insisting that nobody had "chopped off heads" since those medieval times, apparently unaware of the beheading spree of the French revolution.
Trump compulsively watches hours and hours of cable news shows so he says doesn't have time to
read books (or briefing reports, for that matter.) He claims he doesn't need to because
he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”
Trump defenders on television insist that it's unfair to criticize him for his imprecise language and confused rendering of history, that everyone is holding him to an impossible standard. But he's the one who set this standard by bragging endlessly that he is smarter than everyone in the world and has no need for facts or information because he inherently knows the right answer. When he proves otherwise, as he does nearly every day, he only has himself to blame if people point out that he has said something embarrasingly wrong.