In a Monday interview with CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on the network’s broadcast of Newsroom, Time Magazine national security correspondent John Walcott told the anchor that reports of Donald Trump’s “willful ignorance” about policy and international affairs are woefully true, and that even the most ridiculous parts of what people may have heard are factual — and politically horrifying.
It was a summary of a larger interview with two of Trump’s senior intelligence officials who elected to break their silence after two long years of watching the President simply ignore those facts he didn’t like — or worse, storm away in anger — and watching him simply not care about most of the rest. Walcott told the host,
I think you saw a good example of that earlier in the [pre-Super Bowl] interview with Margaret Brennan on Sunday, which is that, when he’s briefed on something that doesn’t square with his policy views or his personal views, he simply rejects it and goes his own way.”
He went on to detail a shocking passage from the piece he wrote for Time that describes how the President mistakenly believed that two independent nations on the Asian subcontinent were “part of” India, and his embarrassingly bad mangling of the names of those two countries:
There are a combination of things. The first one is the President’s ignorance. That goes to the point about thinking that Nepal and Bhutan, which, incidentally, he also mispronounced as ‘nipple‘ and ‘button,’ were part of India, which they’re not.”
“Wait, seriously?” Baldwin asked. “Seriously,” Walcott responded.
So how does a national security correspondent end up writing a story about Trump’s mortifyingly inadequate knowledge of foreign affairs? Simple: That very lack of curiosity and willingness to simply reject things he doesn’t like — the inability to pay attention during meetings, even when, as Walcott’s piece points out, staffers used bright colors and small words and pointedly called him by “President Trump” as often as possible — all add up to a serious danger for our national security.
We have a President who, should he get that mythical “3 AM phone call” might either be busy tweeting about Crooked Hillary and the Witch Hunt, or not be able to find the country the call is about on a map.
Watch the CNN clip here:
Featured image via screen capture
