President Trump Is What Happens After Republicans Spend Decades Rebranding Knowledge as Elitism and Ignorance as Bliss

The following commentary by Michael Tomasky was posted on the Daily Beast website June 8, 2018:

‘I don’t think I have to prepare very much’ for the upcoming meeting with Kim Jong Un, Trump says. Here’s how we ended up with president who’s all gut, no knowledge.

Thursday morning, after hearing that Donald Trump got huffy with Justin Trudeau over Canada “burning down” the White House in the War of 1812, I sent out a tweet noting that in fact we, the United States, invaded Canada during that war; we even burned down government buildings in Toronto (then called York). As usual, what Trump said to Trudeau was not only not the truth, but turned reality inside out and ran it through the pulverizer.

One of my regular correspondents replied that Trump may have been confused by “this,” followed by the trailer for Canadian Bacon, the 1995 John Candy movie in which an unpopular president starts a war with Canada to raise his approval numbers.

I started laughing, but stopped when it hit me that with Trump, anything’s possible. Check that—it’s not possible that he read a history book. It also seems unlikely that he would have watched a serious movie that tried hard to get things right, such as Lincoln, which would bore him to tears within a half an hour. On the other hand, that episode of All in the Familywhere Archie tells Meathead the “truth” about the causes of the Depression—now that’s  more like it for Trump source material.

Conservative readers are saying right now, “there you go again, you snooty liberals, you and your book-learnin’.” All right, sure. There’s no doubt that it’s a liberal reflex to sometimes make fun of conservatives for not knowing things. And yeah, some liberals do that in a superior and supercilious tone.

I’m sorry. By which I mean, I’m not remotely sorry: It is worse—plainly and unambiguously worse—to be ignorant of basic history than it is to know that history and be a little insufferable about knowing it. A civilization that has concluded that the latter is worse is a civilization that is valuing attitude and posture over fact, and that is precisely the corkscrewed value system that gave us a cretin like Trump in the first place.

When the conservative counter-offensive really kicked in, back in the 1970s, conservatives who wanted to dramatically remake and reorder American society knew they had a big job in front of them. All kinds of presumptions about how life and society worked were lodged deep in people’s minds. Many—most, indeed perhaps nearly all—of those assumptions were kind of liberal. The Republicans caused the Depression. Roosevelt saved the country. Unions helped us prosper in the postwar era. Science was noble, and experts were to be venerated. Religion was to remain private. The generals got us into an unwinnable war in Vietnam. And so on.