1d ago

Trump did not understand Pearl Harbor, new book reveals: 'What's this all about?'

www.independent.co.uk Trump did not understand Pearl Harbor, new book reveals: 'What's this all about?'

A Very Stable Genius reveals a US president ignorant of geography who struggled to read constitution

Summary

A new book, A Very Stable Genius by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, reveals Donald Trump's ignorance on key historical and geopolitical issues.

During a 2017 visit to the USS Arizona Memorial, Trump reportedly asked, "What's this all about?" showing a lack of understanding of Pearl Harbor.

The book also details Trump's confusion over India's border with China, his eagerness to meet Vladimir Putin before taking office, and his frustration with anti-bribery laws.

The authors claim their findings are based on extensive interviews and documents.

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- Especially considering WW2 is a complete mess of revisionist history to justify everything the allies did (just look at how many people thought ANYONE cared about the victims of the holocaust, for example) and the Pacific front is especially ignored because we very rapidly made Japan our “ally” in the wake of the war.
  Fucking what.
  
  Let me see if I can break it down more clearly:
  “Nazi talking points”
  They’re posting Nazi talking points.
  
  You can fuck off with the "no one cared about the holocaust" bullshit.
  My Oma's family sheltered a jewish family during WW2 during Nazi occupation.
  They didn't know precisely what was happening, just that jewish people were being targeted and vanishing anywhere the Nazis controlled. A jewish family that was friends with her dad mostly fled to the US, but one man(a lawyer if memory serves) and the elderly mother stayed behind as she was deemed too sick to survive the trip. Her parents put them up.
  Shortly after they were betrayed (by a starving neighbor desperate for rations who questioned why a healthy family of three had daily house calls from a doctor.)
  A local industry (owned by a friend of the lawyer) stepped out and tried to get everyone including the jewish people, released from Nazi custody in return for the company relenting to Nazi pressure and helping them.
  The Nazis released all of the non-jewish people, including my great-grandfather. The business changed their output slightly so that it wouldn't be noticed that the pipes were sigificantly weaker than they should be.
  
  The U.S. especially has built up this myth that they came to liberate Germany to save the Jewish people from concentration camps. Considering the Americans were anti-semitic as hell at the time, to the point they were denying Jews entry to the U.S., it's a pretty fucking wild bit of historical revision.
  
  Okay so that is a wild run on sentence that was very confusing to read but I think I figured out what they were going for?
  I assume this person is saying that atrocities committed by Japan, such as Unit 731, are not as widely known as the Holocaust. Which was a specific deliberate choice by General MacArthur during the reconstruction of Japan following the dissolution of the monarchy.
  If anyone is interested (and has 2 hours to kill lol) this video was quite illuminating on the subject.
- Donald Trump was born 13 months after the end of WWII in Europe. 9 months after the fall of Japan. WWII isn't "history" for him: he should know as much about Pearl Harbor as you do about 9/11.
  
  Okay. How many people actually know WHY 9-11 happened? What events led up to it and what the motivations and knock ons were? At best you get a borderline meme response of "it was actually the saudis".
  Similarly, how many people living through the 00s were tricked into thinking invading Iraq had anything to do with 9-11? Similarly, how many people understood the human rights horrors that were mostly ignored in favor of "Dey got WMDs!!!"
  History and propaganda are a hell of a linked thing. But, again, that is why leaders should actually read the briefings their aides make for them.
  
  What's any of that have to do with knowing that 9/11 happened? Standing on the Arizona Memorial, asking "What's this all about?" isn't asking for a dissertation on US-Japan relations, or nuances of 1940s US politics. It's asking why there's a big white building in the middle of the bay.
  
  Okay. Rhetorical question because we all are historians with internet boxes but what did the Arizona do? How many Japanese planes did it down or sailors did it rescue or what? And is there anything touchy that shouldn't be mentioned?
  Again. That is not something anyone other than an SME should be expected to memorize. It IS something that should be provided as part of the briefing before you go there. Which is the fundamental difference between "ha, he is so stupid" and "he is just a fucking prick who doesn't care"
  As an example that nobody is going to read: I used to have a job that resulted in having to go to a bunch of military bases on the regular. And we would inevitably end up at a memorial or talking to a totally famous unit that we all totally cared about (the irony being that I actually do enjoy reading military history and STILL had no idea who most of them were due to military culture building up everything in the past to indoctrinate people into thinking they are part of something greater than themselves). And you learn REAL fast that just using context clues and winging it with a platitude ends REAL bad when a marine gets pissy that you didn't properly show deference to the guys who were in that unit 20 years ago because you accidentally implied they didn't try hard enough or they fled sooner than they did or something else.
  And you know how we handled that? Googling the base and what units were stationed there at the airport while we waited for our flights. It had nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with caring enough to at least pretend to care. And the cooler folk (funny enough, almost exclusively Navy) figured out our bullshit real fast and loved to read the cliff notes while we were getting drinks after the meetings.
  
  Similarly, how many people living through the 00s were tricked into thinking invading Iraq had anything to do with 9-11?
  If I recall correctly at the height of the Iraq War it was like 80% of the country believed they were connected.
- This isn't some obscure statistic or random battle that he is ignorant of. It's literally the inciting incident that got the United States to join the war. The Japanese forces launched a sneak attack on the US there, that's literally all he needed to know.
  You either don't understand that either, in which case you're showcasing your own ignorance, or you're making excuses for him, in which case you're a sycophant and can be disregarded.
- The point is he wasnt lacking the knowledge of why pearl harbor happened, but wtf the memorial was even about.
  
  The point is he is a prick who didn't even care enough to pay attention to the briefing someone was reading him in the car/helicopter ride over.
  But we see this time and time again where people watched too much House or West Wing growing up and want to "gotcha" people for not having an encyclopedic knowledge of every single topic they are ever going to run into. And that is a fundamentally stupid mindset that discourages people from ever admitting "I don't know, let me get back to you". I mean, just look at the person who is naive enough to think people know ANYTHING about 9-11 just because they lived through the early 00s.
  But there IS a very big difference between quickly memorizing some bullet points (Pearl Harbor was bad. Japan attacked us but be cool about that because they are our allies... for now. These ships sustained damage so make sure you talk about how awesome they were. Etc) and remembering off the top of your head the exact number of planes a given pilot downed after heroically getting into the air. People think everyone needs to be President Bartlet with the power of an entire writer's room behind you.
  Which, ironically, lines up with a lot of the anti-intellectual bullshit that fasacists the world around have been pushing for decades. The villain with twenty PhDs is actually stupid because they don't know one bit of trivia that the hero, and by association you the viewer, do.

63 comments