While most Americans are aware of Donald Trump’s learning disabilities related to reading, the supposedly-stable genius of a president also has difficulty with mathematics, as his multiple bankruptcies may have already suggested.
Combine his inability to grasp the concept of percentages with his long-ingrained and deeply-held racist belief system and the result is something like what came out of his mouth during an interview with CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge at the White House today.
Trump played a dual role during the encounter, acting as both an interviewee and a media critic during the interview, particularly when Herridge asked him why so many African Americans were “still dying at the hands of local law enforcement in this country.”
Trump’s response?
“So are White people. So are White people. What a terrible question to ask. So are White people,” the president claimed. “More White people, by the way. More White people.”
This is where Trump’s mathematical deficiencies come into play.
While it is indeed true that the sheer number of white people killed in encounters with police was greater than the absolute numbers of Black citizens murdered at law enforcement’s hands — at least according to a study published by Harvard researchers last month, since police departments are not required to report substantive data on their victims — another 2018 study found that, since the African American population makes up only 13.4% of the country, on a percentage basis, Black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than their white brethren.
Such advanced statistical analysis is far beyond the comprehension of the man who unbelievably has control of the nuclear codes.
Intellectual dexterity, however, is not the hallmark of a president who is either too developmentally stunted to even recognize how racist his words actually sound to reasonable Americans or who otherwise knows exactly how he sounds and thinks it’s to his electoral advantage to signal his “authenticity” to his base.
Trump also said he believed flying the Confederate flag was an issue of freedom of speech. When pressed, the president said: "Well, people love it and I don't view — I know people that like the Confederate flag and they're not thinking about slavery."https://t.co/GLhLtdtwYq
— Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) July 14, 2020
Defending the display of the Confederate flag as a free speech issue will not do much to help dispel the president’s public reputation as perfectly suited for the role of a Grand Wizard of the KKK, an organization that has enthusiastically supported his presidency.
“All I say is freedom of speech. It’s very simple. My attitude is freedom of speech. Very strong views on the Confederate flag. With me, it’s freedom of speech. Very simple. Like it, don’t like it, it’s freedom of speech,” Trump grunted in his uniquley inarticulate manner.
Oddly, it is a freedom that he doesn’t seem to apply to the peaceful protestors at BLM marches across the country that he has decried as the work of radical leftist members of Antifa, whom he has vowed to crush and has labeled a terrorist organization.
Somehow, Trump is more welcoming of a flag celebrating the defeated army of a breakaway group of states defending the institution of slavery than he is of legitimate demands for police reform despite the fact that each could be characterized as examples of the exercise of “freedom of speech.”
Perhaps we should add logic to the extensive list of subjects in which Donald Trump earns a failing grade.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Grace Segers at CBS News.
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