Saturday, July 20, 2019

Where Trump Fails A Simple Knowledge Or Memory Test


Here's a not-so-reassuring story about our Dear Leader:

When President Trump this week met human rights activist Nadia Murad, an Iraqi who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for speaking out about her agonizing torture and rape while in Islamic State captivity, he seemed unaware of her story and the plight of her Yazidi ethnic minority.
Do read the whole story where you will find that Trump's ignorance is of the extreme sort. 

Keep in mind that presidents are briefed right before such meetings, so either Trump wasn't listening to the briefing at all or he had already forgotten what he was told about the Yazidis* not very many minutes earlier.  Both explanations are disconcerting.  Or should be disconcerting if we lived in more ordinary times.


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* To put Nadia Murad's experiences into context, read this post (trigger warning for extreme violence) I wrote in 2015 about the treatment of women and especially Yazidi women and girls  by ISIS then.