Donald Trump: What Is 'College'?
Even Sen. John Blutarsky was outraged.
Donald Trump went to Richfield, Ohio, yesterday to give a big speech on his infrastructure "plan" -- which of course is a scam to move public money into private equity firms' profit columns. But since he'd been forced to stay quiet for the past few days so he wouldn't say anything about that porn star lady he definitely never slept with, not even having his speech projected onto teleprompters could keep him on topic. Infrastructure is sooooo boring to him, and there were LOTS of other things he'd rather talk about, like how he might hold off on signing a new trade deal with South Korea, so that will somehow put pressure on North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program. Yes, you read that right -- it's just an idea he's thinking about, because he is A IDIOT.
He spent a fair amount of time trashing Democrats and urging his audience to get out in the fall to vote Republican, which, if you want to get all technical about it, is the sort of campaigning that's supposed to be prohibited during taxpayer-funded events like this. As if that mattered. He lied about an existing project to rebuild some border fencing, saying it was part of his big beautiful wall, and added that Democrats are very evil people who want terrible bad things for America:
They want people to come in from the border, and they want, I guess, I can’t imagine they want, but certainly drugs are flowing across borders.
Of the many stupid things Trump said in the speech -- which the big three cable news networks gave up on after about 30 minutes (Fox Business stayed on to the bitter end) -- our favorite was what seems to be a fairly new Trump obsession: his insistence that "community colleges" are exactly the same as "vocational schools," with the implication that "community college" is some sort of liberal euphemism designed to insult working class folks, who are surely as ignorant as he is:
As that MSNBC clip notes, this is far from the first time Trump has confused community colleges with vocational schools, which really are not the same thing at all -- many community colleges do provide vocational programs (Yr Dok Zoom started out in a very good community college aviation program, until I realized that while I loved flying, I didn't want to do it as a jerb), but many more of them do the whole "get your first two years of undergrad general education" thing as well.
After Trump made similar comments in February, a whole bunch of community college leaders said "Hey, we're already doing vocational stuff, and a lot more," but somehow that message never made it to the Big Man. You'd think someone would have mentioned that to him at some point, but then, this is the Trump administration, and this is Trump -- the man seems completely resistant to facts once he has a bad idea stuck in his head.
Why is Trump so insistent that if he doesn't know what a community college is, then the very concept is somehow dishonest? Crom only knows -- maybe it's somehow connected with his fake populism, his belief that America will be Great Again once all the factory jobs come back, and (assuming he really thinks they're just rebranded vo-tech programs) calling vocational schools "colleges" somehow insults decent hardworking Americans. That wouldn't be too far from Rick Santorum's infamous dismissal of Barack Obama's encouraging all American students to pursue college after high school: "What a snob!" Or maybe it's somehow connected to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's friendliness to for-profit colleges that have done such a fine job of scamming students and raking in federal money.
Hell, maybe he's still pissed that he had to settle that lawsuit against Trump "University," and he just assumes that "community colleges" are lying about what they offer -- he falsely labeled some crappy real-estate seminars a "university," so why wouldn't any other school try to pull the same scam?
[ Boston Globe / Vox / Inside Higher Education ]
It is a feature of personality disorders that they have difficulty learning from experience, especially negative experiences. The Ol' Pussy Grabber's extreme narcissism means that he assumes two things about whatever he thinks: (1) everyone thinks it, too, or will believe it once told because (2) he's right. It's why he says dumb as shit things and can't be dissuaded from his dumb as shit ideas. I'm telling you, all you need to know about the caricature of a human being is that he is a narcissist.
This is exactly why mental health specialists have a duty to warn when a person with a possible mental illness is threatening to harm herself or others, and, therefore, a duty to warn about the Ol' Pussy Grabber. Knowing he is an unproductive malignant narcissistic personality disorder predicts everything you've posted about and more. This complete disaster of a presidency was entirely foreseeable and, consequently, preventable. That the political parties don't have a mechanism for preventing such an unqualified candidate from running is criminal.