Way back in March 2016, when there was still some question as to whether Donald Trump would be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Ezra Klein wrote a piece for Vox that stood out for me. The headline read, “Donald Trump is too gullible to be president.”
Klein made the case that the then-candidate had proven himself incapable of knowing the difference between good information and bad. “His tendency to solicit, repeat, and retweet self-serving falsehoods served up by sycophants and hangers-on should be taken seriously,” the Vox piece read. “Among the most important tasks the president has is knowing what to believe, whom to listen to, which facts to trust, and which theories to explore. Trump’s terrible judgment in this regard is one of the many reasons he’s not qualified for the office.”
It’s an assessment that came to mind anew over the weekend. HuffPost noted:
During his Sunday morning torrent of Truth Social posts, Trump amplified a headline about his perceived nemesis, former President Barack Obama. The problem is that the headline is from a satirical news website that published it nine months ago.
As difficult as it might be to believe, there’s a satirical outlet called the Dunning-Kruger Times — named after a cognitive bias that leads ignorant people to overestimate their abilities — that published a report that was obviously intended to be funny. The article in question said that Obama was receiving $2.6 million a year for “royalties associated with Obamacare,” before the Department of Government Efficiency intervened and halted the payments.
And while it might seem impossible that anyone would actually believe such a joke, Trump published an item to his social media platform promoting the satirical item, alongside text that read, “Wow!” The president must’ve overlooked the “About Us” page on the Dunning-Kruger Times, which includes this straightforward disclaimer: “Everything on this website is fiction. … If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.” That 2016 headline about Trump being “too gullible to be president” resonates for a reason.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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