Trump as you know is out to remake higher education in this country into his own image. Yuck. He’s been bullying major, highly respected universities and sadly sometimes getting his way. While it seems most of his ire had been on Ivy League schools for reasons I don’t know (other than they are a premier university in California) UCLA is on his hit list. So Trumpty sent them a 28 page letter in which he told them they were fined $1.2 Billion for ‘civil rights violations’ and ‘anti-semitism.’ Twenty-eight pages, and boy oh boy was this letter a doozy.
As this article from Alternet explains the missive was hastily slapped together. That’s a kind characterization. From the sound of it the letter appears to have been written by dumbass adolescents while simultaneously playing video games with Trump rambling on TV in the background. It was riddled with typos. And grammatical errors. And some bigly factual errors:
Some of the more egregious errors besides the grammatical ones in which “nouns and verbs occasionally do not match in tense,” are more factual, or, rather, lack thereof.
“There are references to the “president” of UCLA, but the top campus administrator, Julio Frenk, is a “chancellor,” the LAT notes.
“A sentence about medical facilities references the “Feinberg School of Medicine,” which is at Northwestern University“, not UCLA.
” Despite correctly referring to Željka Cvijanović, the Chairwoman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina as “Her Excellency,” the letter to her begins with “Dear Mr President.”
In another Truth Social post in which he thanked the B-2 pilots who took part in the attack on Iran, Trump, in all caps, misspelled his own name as, ” “DONAKD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!”
Sure, it can be a bit of fun on some level to make light of Trump MIS-spelling his own freaking name. However the linked article notes it’s not about typos and the like bu what The Guardian calls “Governing by mistake”:
“Have we ever seen a more error-prone, incompetent and fumbling presidency? In their rush to implement a barely concealed authoritarian agenda, this administration is producing a litany of blunders, gaffes and slip-ups. At times, they’ll seek to hide those mistakes by projecting a shield of authoritarianism. At other times, they’ll claim the mistake as a method of walking back an unpopular authoritarian agenda item. Either way, it’s a unique style of rule, one that I call “rule by error,” says The Guardian’s Moustafa Bayoumi.
The United States of America was before Trump the unquestioned leader of the free-world (in other words most of it) from WWII on. Now we are increasingly regarded as a joke which is bad but more and more our allies see a country in which a major Party would even nominate someone like Trump, much less see him not SOUNDLY defeated by tens of millions of votes but elevated to the Presidency not once but twice as a DANGEROUS joke.
The Guardian nailed it. With Trump it’s government by mistake/error. Even if Mother Nature were to complete her work and Trump’s body gives out we’d still be stuck with Vance and most if not all the idiots Trump installed in key positions. Right now were are effectively in the middle of a battle against an enemy that has us pinned down, trying to save critically wounded comrades with bullets whizzing overhead and mortars and artillery rounds dropping around us. All we can do is try to survive and apply enough field first-aid to stop the bleeding. And figure out how to get room to both actually stop the bleeding and return fire to regain the upper hand.
In our current situation that means working like hell, doing whatever we can no matter how small to retake Control of Congress in the midterms next fall. Both the House AND the Senate. While we’re doing that, we also have to prepare for what my Marine ancestors faced again and again fighting their way across the Pacific – political version of those ghastly “Banzai!” charges.
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Trump loves the poorly educated because 1) he’s poorly educated himself; 2) he realizes that these people look at Trump as knowledgeable about money, etc., (which they don’t) and can’t fact-check him; and 3) these people become sheep, basically, and will do/believe anything Trump orates upon.
Unfortunately, this only works for Trump. Other Republicons, not so much….
Maybe we should thank our proverbial lucky stars that Trump and all his lickspittle sycophants are so incompetent; they’re making so many mistakes and public humiliations for themselves that our democracy just might survive their attack. If Trump were clever, he’d be doing a better job of carrying out Putin’s orders to weaken America. I suspect that the slimy Vance would be a more dangerous Kremlin asset.