Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/07/when-hosting-snl-donald-trump.html
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When hosting SNL, Donald Trump ‘struggled to read,’ says former cast member. Can the President read?
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Maybe not fully, but damned near.
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America, I love you to pieces, but you’re fucking crazy, y’know that?
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Does “struggled to read” mean literally read or is it used in a cold reading (theatrical) sense?
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In all fairness the SNL writers didn’t make much of an effort to keep Trump’s dialogue
under 140 characters.
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Along those same lines, this was pretty revealing.
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To paraphrase @anansi133, “p96, I love you to pieces, but you’re fucking reading too much into it, y’know that?”
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Didn’t he go to Business School? Wharton? I’m sure if he couldn’t read that would have been pretty difficult to hide.
If he was totally illiterate maybe, but you’d be surprised how far grossly incompetent people can coast with the right connections.
We don’t know how well he did in school because he never released his transcripts (despite demands that Obama do same). As for the rest of his career he never really even had to try hiding his poor reading skills since 2016 was the closest thing he ever had to a job interview.
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Not that difficult, given era and sufficient cash. It was much, much easier to get away with paying someone else to write your papers then, and harder to detect plagiarism. A lot of frats kept thousands of papers on file, and students with parents paying full freight at private schools got different treatment from scholarship students at public land-grant institutions.
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You’d be surprised what an illiterate person can hide, even in that kind of setting. They come up with all sorts of clever and inventive ruses to hide it.* That’s especially true when a student is a legacy and a natural-born con man who has the money to pay other people to do the reading and writing for him.
I don’t think he’s completely illiterate. I do think he’s been aliterate for so long thanks to other people doing the reading for him that his reading comprehension skills degraded back to those of a 11-year-old (which, not unrelated, is roughly where his emotional development is arrested at).
Note that he frequently claims that the last book he read was “All Quiet on the Western Front”, a novel that’s often assigned reading for adolescents (more so in military academies). The last book he read in full might very well have been that one in the 7th or 8th grade, and decades later it might be a struggle for him.
[* some of his:
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“This print is really small and I forgot my glasses.”
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“I’m a busy man and I’m always interrupted when I try to read.”
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“I’m not a lawyer|scientist|military officer – maybe someone here can explain this document in layman’s terms.”
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“I’m more of a visual and auditory thinker. Oral presentations and photos work better for me.”]
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So the headline is “Donnie reads poorly” rather than “Why Donnie can’t read”
I can’t even feign surprise at that.
He’s definitely challenged: Narcissistic Personality Disorder, weak literacy skills, no concept of the constitution or presidential powers, no concept of what the CFR has on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy on and on.
This will end well.
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For crying out loud. “Can Donald Trump read?” I didn’t realize Glenn Beck was “just asking questions” as Xeni these days.
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He pretty much admits it during an interview. When he really hunkers down and applies himself, he can read the first half-page of a book, though he doesn’t “read” it so much as “look at” it, and what about government waste, am I right?!
Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book, I’m trying to get started. Every time I do about a half a page, I get a phone call that there’s some emergency, this or that. But we’re going to see the home of Andrew Jackson today in Tennessee and I’m reading a book on Andrew Jackson. I love to read. I don’t get to read very much, Tucker, because I’m working very hard on lots of different things, including getting costs down. The costs of our country are out of control. But we have a lot of great things happening, we have a lot of tremendous things happening.
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So long as we’re just asking questions, maybe he’s dyslexic and covering for it with big talk because he grew up in a time before widespread teaching awareness of dyslexia?
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Thanks, I think… It’s a fun theory, but when SNL’s Pete Davidson relates the part about Cheeto Benito misreading the line “All right, let’s get out of here. Turkey legs?” as “All right, let’s get out of here turkey legs.” sounds exactly like the acting meaning of “read”.
Agent Orange will be remembered as the worst president in history, but concluding that his apparent disinterest in reading means he literally can’t read seems to be foolish. My theory is that he thinks he’s too important to read.
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More realistically the question should probably be “can the President read beyond a third-grade level?”
I have yet to see any evidence he can.
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You seem to be suggesting that this is a baseless claim, but there’s plenty of evidence that Trump is, at best, a poor reader who never reads for pleasure and, at worst, functionally illiterate. This isn’t something Xeni made up to smear him, a la Glenn Beck. Watch, for starters, the Samantha Bee segment on it.
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It makes Ivanka’s position at the white house pretty obviously, “official reader for daddy”. If true, I mean. Facts dont mean as much as they used to.
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