Today’s Unfathomably Stupid Trump Quote Is About George Washington

Today’s Unfathomably Stupid Trump Quote Is About George Washington

How does it feel knowing you’re smarter than the President of the United States? I know that it’s the Trump Era and we’re all walking around carrying varying degrees of numbness—but given the respect for the office that I was raised to have—I simply cannot get over this fact. The President of the United States of America has the cognitive abilities of a five-year-old who just sustained a severe concussion. Every day we get a new adventure in lunacy, and today’s entry is both exceptionally stupid and a nice little window into our president’s fundamentally broken way of thinking. Per a new Politico report:

During a guided tour of Mount Vernon last April with French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump learned that Washington was one of the major real-estate speculators of his era. So, he couldn’t understand why America’s first president didn’t name his historic Virginia compound or any of the other property he acquired after himself.

“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

So apparently because George Washington didn’t name his estate after himself, we have no way of remembering him because if you don’t name your own buildings after yourself, how can people remember you? Well…except for Washington D.C., the Washington monument, Washington state, over 50 cities and towns across the country, 13 colleges and universities, and countless parks, bridges, monuments and street names.

Seriously, the President of the United States said that our first president—whose name is slapped on more things in this country than probably most other presidents combined—supposedly wasn’t smart because he didn’t stamp his name in giant letters on his slave plantation. Trump reportedly told his associates that the tour was “truly bizarre,” likely because it forced him to think about a human being other than himself for more than five seconds, and Trump is wholly illiterate when it comes to anything other than his own personal grievances.

Speaking of personal grievances, Siri, show me what projection looks like (per Politico again):

Trump asked whether Washington was “really rich,” according to a second person familiar with the visit. In fact, Washington was either the wealthiest or among the wealthiest Americans of his time, thanks largely to his mini real estate empire.

“That is what Trump was really the most excited about,” this person said.

Psychological projection is the act of denying a reality in yourself while imposing it on to others, all done in the service of preserving one’s ego. The subtext of the Mueller investigation and Trump’s tax returns is the likelihood that Trump is nowhere near as wealthy as he claims to be, and so moments like this are actually quite enlightening in that we get to see what truly stresses Trump out.

Trump is a fraud, and we can all tell that deep-down he clearly knows it. George Washington was a larger-than-life character who was able to create a serious legacy by leading a cause larger than himself. Trump cannot even grasp that fundamental concept because in Trump’s world, there is no cause more important than himself. In Trump’s Big Mac-addled brain, George Washington didn’t help create the foundation upon which Trump’s power is centered upon—Washington is simply just another person to be pushed down in order for Trump to push himself up. We have all met fundamentally miserable people like this in our lives, and if you’re smart, you try to avoid them. Instead, America made one of these people our president and now we’re stuck in an endless feedback loop of abject stupidity.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.

 
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