President’s Day was last week and in light of a holiday that most celebrate via vacation, I’d like to offer a quick trivia question to test your president knowledge. Here we go!
In what year did President Donald Trump file for bankruptcy?
A) 2004
B) 2009
C) 1991
D) 1992
Give up? It’s not your fault; that was a trick question. The answer is all of them (1991, 1992, 2004 and 2009). The leader of the free world filed for bankruptcy four times and the most recent one, wasn’t even a decade ago.
If you found that depressing, a poll by Business Insider recently indicated that Americans increasingly believe that President Trump is incompetent. But surely, a man who has never read a biography, grabs women by their Kit Kat bar and fumbles with structuring a coherent sentence in his native language could not be at risk for incompetency. Or maybe, he is? Here are three brief personal tweets from President Trump that indicate he might have the incompetency blues.
1. Announcing to the American people that only news outlets that disagree with him are considered fake news.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” – Thomas Jefferson
Though Thomas Jefferson notoriously developed animosity towards the press. He understood that the fourth estate was essential and that government needed surveillance and that a system that favored state rather than the public was, inadvertently or not, creating a platform for dictatorship. To trivialize the leader of the free world alludes to news outlets as hoaxes or lies, solely because they disagree with him, is to misunderstand the reasons for free press.
2. Tweeting considerably exaggerated claims via a social media platform.
I already made my point about the dangers of alluding to mainstream media outlets as fake news, right? Good. Now I can go straight to the second portion of this tweet “Inherited a MESS and am in the process of fixing it.” Though the world at large might be a mess, claiming a mess has been inherited is considerably misleading. The U.S. Labor Market: End-of-Year review and outlet even enclosed that the “U.S. labor market is in its best shape since the recession, with nearly every measure of the market at its most favorable level in years.”
3. Shaming leaked information when it’s against him.
At a campaign rally in October, President Trump advocated for WikiLeaks. Presuming that he, at the time, did not consider WikiLeaks un-American. However, to endorse any hacking of a federal official because it benefits your campaign is not only unethical, but also absurd. If President Trumps desires the respect of the American people, he needs to listen better, act better and do better.