The last time America decided a member of the executive branch was simply too stupid to serve in office was after Vice-President Dan Quayle attended a 1992 spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey and wrongly told a student that he had misspelled ‘potato.’ It was only partially Quayle’s fault though, because the school had misspelled it as “potatoe” on the flash card it provided to him. This time is different. President Trump is blaming his flubs on the teleprompter which was covered in rain and hard to read, and which he claims was malfunctioning. But Trump isn’t claiming that someone loaded the teleprompter with bad information about the storming of airports during the American Revolutionary War. He isn’t saying that anyone told him that the Star-Spangled Banner flew over a Revolutionary War naval battle rather than a battle of the War of 1812. He just said those things all on his own because he’s an impossible idiot.
Trump has slipped up in making historical references before. He referred to Frederick Douglass during a 2017 Black History Month event as if he were still alive, even though the famed abolitionist died in 1895. He also claimed that President Andrew Jackson was angry about “what was happening” with the Civil War, although Jackson died 16 years before the war began.
Quayle was unlucky. Many of the people who too-smugly mocked him for not being able to spell ‘potato’ would have failed to use the ‘e’ in the pluralized version (‘potatoes’). If the school had given him the correct spelling on the flashcard, the whole incident would not have happened at all. But he was lucky in one respect. Al Gore had not yet made the internet publicly available, so Quayle didn’t have to endure countless mocking memes from ordinary citizens, like this one depicting Washington crossing the terminal to reach the 1776 Battle of Baggage Claim.
#RevolutionaryWarAirportStories
The Battle of Baggage Claim (1776)
Many Lives were lost. And Bags too. Some people are saying it was the worst massacre they had ever seen.Art from @Acyn pic.twitter.com/ZuKfgy3ghd
— Covfefe Shecky Jones,King Of Shade👑 aka BROLENE🔞 (@King_Of_Shade) July 5, 2019
Yet, even unburdened by the scourge of social media, Quayle’s potatoe fiasco was so harmful that Newsweek seemed stunned when he wasn’t dropped from the 1992 ticket:
Talk about survivors: Dan Quayle has been rolling, over and over, on the racetrack of politics ever since he bounced off the media guardrail in the first lap of the 1988 Republican convention. His “approval” rating in some polls is lower than ever. Republican insiders and conservative columnists have begged him to quit-and begged George Bush to dump him. Yet here he is, on his way to Houston, alive on the GOP’s Die Hard ticket. How has he endured? From interviews with his top advisers and travels on the campaign trail, NEWSWEEK has pieced together the story of how Quayle, in his guileless way, survived coup plots and his own bumbling…
Above all, the people needed some explanation for why Quayle wasn’t dropped. It was that obvious that he was an anvil around the president’s neck. And it wasn’t because the people thought he was a crook. It was entirely because they thought he was a moron.
This was before George W. Bush asked “is our children learning?” and talked about “working hard to put food on your family.” It was before Tina Fey mocked Sarah Palin about being able to see Russia from her house. America actually had some standards about what kind of people they expected to see serving in our nation’s highest offices.
The bar had been lowered so far by 2016 that even a mental midget like Donald Trump could pole vault over it with a campaign based on insults and racial prejudice.
But Trump thrived by being the one dishing out the ridicule. A lot of people were highly entertained as he verbally abused everyone in sight. They didn’t care about the hifalutin standards of Ivy League-educated journalists and editorial boards that uniformly found him unfit for office. They didn’t care if he was a sexual predator and they didn’t believe his wealth was built more on inheritance and fraud than hard work and business know-how. He was making fun of the right people, and that was good enough for them.
But this airport thing may have crossed a line. This isn’t a mistake the average citizen looks at and thinks they might make themselves. This doesn’t make them think that Trump is just like them. I mean, basically no one thinks that there airplanes or airports in the 18th-Century during the founding of our country. Trump might be the only person on the planet who thinks that.
It makes people wonder if he’s even from this planet.
This meme is going to have some really staying power. It makes Trump look ridiculous like nothing he has done in the past. It’s going to make a lot of people conclude for the first time that his critics are right and he’s just too much of an idiot to be the president.
Unfortunately, IMHO, many/most/all of people who finally realize that Trump is an actual idiot will just rationalize it as “Yeah, ok, he’s an idiot, but how much damage can an idiot REALLY do? After all, he’s an idiot, right? And look at all the great judges and commie-punching and cruelty to brown people we’re getting!”
I’ve already seen Trump being rigorously defended on blog comments. His gaffe being equated with some of Obama’s. Let’s face it Mel Brooks had it right – slightly updated: “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of flyover land. You know… morons.”
That being so then logically as George Carlin rightly points out: “If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.”
This won’t hurt Trump at all with his base. To them he is not a ridiculous ignoramus – he just misspoke. He is just like them…and don’t ignoramuses need representation too?
The hardest thing to accept about his base is that there are twice as many of them as I thought there were. 20% of the country was always like this in plain sight, it’s the additional 20% that makes it frightening.
Ayup, turns out the Crazification Factor is double what we all thought and laughed over. Ain’t laughing much any more.
27% was bad enough, but 40% is another thing entirely. I live in WV, and here it’s 70%. Haunts me.
Does anyone even remember that Obama was constantly mocked for using a teleprompter? There were no crazy gaffes, be wasn’t reliant on it, he just used the technology like everyone else.
If you were a republican, with republican friends, how many of these memes would you be seeing on your facebook feed? My guess is not many.
I’m surprised that President Bone Spurs didn’t tell us about the time he and my grandpa helped General George raid the NY airport. That was airborne, you know.
Where this might hurt is in the general election. Outside groups will probably run ads about this ad nauseam. And our candidate has a ready made zinger for the debates. Throw him off his stride, make him see red in a debate, and whine about how unfair it was. It might help persuade those Obama-Trump voters who have soured on the guy to stay sour.
And, this gaffe is a hard one to defend. Either his team is incompetent, and/or he is an idiot. Whining that the media should not have pointed it out isn’t a defense.
This post motivated me to review Dan Quayle’s political life. I had forgotten that he beat Birch Bayh in the Nov. 1980 Republican tsunami. This result was a precursor of what was to come from the Republican party. I miss the old political days when the Senate had people like Bayh who could author constitutional amendments.
Over at Yastreblyansky, he does an analysis ascribing this to a reading comprehension disability, something out of the DSM called SCRD. Quoting his post:
” …
The reading disability isn’t something familiar like dyslexia, where the problem is in decoding the letters into speech sounds; he’s good enough at that to make it most of the way through reading a 45-minute text aloud. It’s in comprehension, recognizing the meaningfulness of what he’s reading, and its name in the business is Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit or S-RCD, defined in the DSM as
Difficulty understanding the meaning of what is read (e.g., may read text accurately but not understand the sequence, relationships, inferences or deeper meanings of what is read).
(For more, here’s a good quick primer.)
…”
The whole thing well worth a read.
http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-literacy.html
That would account for why he sounds so flat when he reads a speech instead of winging it; he’s mechanically processing meaningless text, word by word.
I can’t share your optimism. I think the people who think he’s an idiot have thought that way for a while. The rest are locked into an abusive and bad relationship that feels like a cross between an abusive relationship and Stockholm syndrome.
One of the hardest things for humans to do is to admit a mistake in public. The only chance we have is for enough people to enter the confessional/voting booth and finally do the right thing.
As Der Trumper records his highest approval rating (44%) so far in his catastrophic prezidancy, it is beyond argument that over 95% of his spite-filled morons and plutocrat-lovers are going to stick with him no matter the gaffe and no matter the scandal or report of lawbreaking. This leaves only a badly handled war or economic reversal as the sole things that could touch him in the eyes of the failed white electorate that thought him “qualified” for the office. Trumper’s tax cut and sadistic Latino hatred are the National Trumpalist versions of Hitler’s Invasions of Poland and France. The imbecile is at his highest water mark!
The comedy here is exactly what the speech actually said, since (unless Trumper wrote it himself) not even the lowest grade National Trumpalist speechwriter or lackey could pen a stirring account of the Revolutionary Airport Battles of 1777–even if Washington’s Storming of Reagan National was thought of greater importance than the revolutionary Battle of Saratoga to the ignoramus Trumper. So how did this gaffe happen? Trump really couldn’t read the teleprompter thing, so he winged it?
Trumper: “And as Americans we’ll not forget Paul McCartney’s famous ride, that was later made into the great song we know so well: “One if by land, two if by sea, and three if by air! As Abraham Lincoln, Big Abe himself said in the Bridgestone Address, all so that government to the people, through the people, near the people, shall not caress from the earth!” (Hugs flag as F-16s rocket overhead….)
It turns out, according to the wonderful post by Yastreblyansky linked by Charon above, that the answer is our Trumper almost certainly cannot understand how to read or how to process word-on-the-page data. Another mental disability which he has to take great pains to hide from his adoring National Trumpalists.
This also would explain the (admitted) propensity of Der Trumper to demand only verbal information, and his OBVIOUS addiction to lie-based right-wing television as his chief information source. He couldn’t have survived in any environment other than a family bizness and as a “star” of braindead teevee.
People are still adding more comments to Yastreblyansky’s post, some of them are worth reading also.
As illustrated by his problems on July 4. Once he misspeaks and then realizes something, but he knows not what, is wrong, he can then dig himself in deeper while futilely attempting to recover. Thus airports, Ft. McHenry, cotton wings on the Wright Brothers’ airplane etc. All because he was just reciting words, making sounds without grasping the meaning.