Besides making the aforementioned 20,000 false and misleading claims since taking office, Trump has done his best — wittingly or unwittingly — to dumb down America like no other president before him. Normally, a president is supposed to represent wisdom, reason, rational thought, and the drive for knowledge, but those are as foreign to Trump as the immigrants of color he refuses to let enter the country. A leading proponent of conspiracy theories, Trump calls anything that shows him in a bad light a hoax or fake news. He has become a poster child for ‘shoot from the hip’ ideology both in news conferences and in back door sessions with his officials. Sadly, Trump is far from a scholar: his spoken and written English are dreadful, he dissociates himself or deliberately calls into question scientific certainties, he behaves like a poorly raised, overly privileged man-child, and his academic achievements are, by several accounts, fabrications.
To say Trump is a fraud would be an understatement. Not only has he driven numerous businesses into the ground and amassed an immense collection of debt, but he pretends to know better than the experts when it’s obvious he hasn’t a clue. A self-proclaimed “very stable genius”, Trump stares directly at the sun during a solar eclipse, blames insufficient raking as the culprit for catastrophic forest fires on the west coast, and postulates that injecting bleach might control COVID-19. Trump’s greatest following are high school graduates and below — just one indication that those with a bit more schooling can see through his lies and fakery. Trump is the kind of president people hold in esteem when they’re intimidated by those who’ve invested the time and effort to learn about the world. When the president was asked recently what literature he appreciated, he could only name the bible, and when asked to specify an inspirational verse, he couldn’t name one.
In sum, Trump not only propagates falsehoods and will say anything if he thinks it’s what people want to hear, but he promotes a society where ignorance is truly bliss, intellectualism is bad, science is debatable, and scholarly study and the pursuit of knowledge are less important than earning more money. That kind of attitude is so contrary to advancement of human civilization, it’s utterly tragic that it’s being promoted by the leader of 350 million people.