‘Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing’

Trump’s ignorance and hatreds continue to define his presidency

Donald Trump, like the Bourbon dynasty, has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” His defining features—aside from narcissism—are his willful, cringeworthy ignorance and his unremitting hunger for vengeance. Both have been on humiliating display of late.

In the first term, Trump postulated that bleach (or light!) might be injected into the human body to cure Covid. If that did not do it, there was always hydroxychloroquine. In Trump 2.0, he’s put on his lab coat to inform us about autism and vaccines.

“In labeling Tylenol use in pregnant women as a potential cause of autism, Trump threw the full weight of his office behind a theory that he acknowledged has yet to be proven,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The article continued: “He defied the careful guidance offered by some in the row of scientific advisers who stood behind him during the Roosevelt Room address.”

Even physician and Republican Senator Bill Cassidy (La.)—who is as responsible as anyone for RFK’s reign of anti-science—spoke up. “The preponderance of evidence shows that this is not the case,” he tweeted. “The concern is that women will be left with no options to manage pain in pregnancy. We must be compassionate to [sic] this problem.”

Trump sounded downright idiotic babbling about childhood vaccines. “They can be great, but when you put the wrong stuff in them, you know… And, you know, children get these massive vaccines like you’d give to a horse… like you’d give to a horse,” he said. He plunged on:

And I’ve said for a long time, I mean, this is no secret—spread them out over five years. Get five shots, small ones. Did you ever see what they give? I mean, for a little baby to be injected with that much fluid, even beyond the actual ingredients, they have sometimes 80 different vaccines in them. It’s crazy.

Vaccines are spaced out, as any parent knows (at least ones remotely involved in their children’s lives). Also, he’s the last person to be talking about what’s “crazy.”

His ignorance knows no territorial bounds, as he revealed to global leaders yesterday. “President Trump’s [United Nations] speech, filled with familiar grievances and false claims, criticized the U.N. as ineffective,” the New York Times reported. He proclaimed, “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.” Charming. I cannot imagine what “stuff” he is good at; surely, it’s not trade policy, cutting prices, ending the war in Ukraine or Gaza, containing the deficit, preventing a shutdown, making public the Epstein files, or following the law.

Sounding like a perfect fool (now, that’s something he excels at!), he went after his usual hobby horses. “He warned darkly of a ‘double-headed monster’ of illegal migration and a shift to renewable energy, and called climate change the ‘greatest con job’ ever perpetrated on the world,” the Times reported. “He accused environmentalists of wanting to ‘kill all the cows,’ personally insulted the Muslim mayor of London and falsely claimed that Muslims in the West are planning to institute Sharia law.”

He is a national embarrassment. Sadly, he has allowed exclusively yes-men and yes-women to surround him, so no one prevents him from saying utterly stupid, inaccurate, uniformed “stuff.”

Trump’s ignorance may be the defining feature of his agenda. He refuses to learn that consumers pay tariffs or that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine or that windmills don’t hurt whales or that immigrants are not responsible for rising crime (which isn’t even rising) or that it is illegal to blow up boats on the high seas that could be interdicted. Knowledge and common sense would simply get in the way of his desire and ambition.

However, his propensity for vengeance is as robust as his ignorance. Trump 2.0 is all about revenge, just as he promised during the campaign. He brazenly told the attorney general (“Pam”) via social media to prosecute his enemies, New York Attorney General Tish James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Cal.)

Most recently, he declared at Charlie Kirk’s funeral (immediately following Erica Kirk’s statement forgiving her husband’s murderer), “I hate my opponent. I don’t want the best for them.” By that he seems to mean anti-MAGA Americans, the majority of the country that did not vote for him and/or has since grown disillusioned.

No one need accuse him of being “presidential” or “growing into the job,” let alone decreasing the gusher of bile pouring out from his followers. As the Times recounted, “He has attacked law firms, universities, political leaders, government agencies, late-night TV hosts, news organizations and cultural institutions, and Mr. Kirk’s killing has only accelerated that campaign.” Now he is expanding his target list to “liberal groups, making the baseless argument that they are part of a violent conspiracy.” (Notice how the Times’ language has toughened up of late. Perhaps the paper is capable of reporting without sane washing.)

It remains near-impossible for tens of millions of Americans—let alone the global audience—to understand how someone this patently and gleefully ignorant, driven almost entirely by personal bitterness, could have been re-elected (even after being convicted of 34 felonies). One can point to former president Joe Biden’s late exit, inflation, voter inattention, or cynicism. Yet no explanation is entirely satisfying. Nothing makes sense of his presence as the leader of our nation. At this point, it is more productive to doggedly defend democracy, sanity, decency, and science, hoping voters still care about such things.

And if the economy is all that voters care about, the bad news for MAGA Republicans is that the economy stinks. Trump may be ignorant about that too, but American voters and families are not.