But Lemon’s response to it aside, Wilson and Ali’s jokes — riffing as it does not just on Trump World’s ignorance, but on its hostility to knowledge — strikes a chord. Consider an anecdote from the new book “A Very Stable Genius” by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. It’s about Trump’s visit to a sacred American shrine, the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. He’s on the boat, being ferried out to this iconic site, and he pulls then-Chief of Staff John Kelly aside. “Hey, John, what’s this all about?” he asks. “What’s this a tour of?”
Maybe if it were a one-off, you could ignore it. But from his disinterring of Frederick Douglass to the creative spellings of his tweets to his geographic gaffes (We just got back from the Middle East,” he once announced — in Israel) Trump produces daily, glaring and incontrovertible evidence of his intellectual dullness.
Which, in Trump World, will cost him absolutely nothing. Small wonder. A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center found that among Americans with college and post-graduate degrees, progressives outpace conservatives by a wide margin. In other words, the right is less well educated. In Trump, they’ve found someone who validates their inchoate biases and fears — and they don’t much care that he doesn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor.
