After stories about aides dumbing down intelligence reports (complete with pictures) and his many, many, MANY, public faux pas on literally any topic he talks about, you’d think that Donald Trump couldn’t possibly lower the intelligence barrier any further.
Well think again.
Proving that the current POTUS is nothing but the master of confounding expectations, POLITICO is now reporting that Trump has no idea on how to pronounce “Nepal” and “Bhutan”, thinks time zones are fake news, and likes to call up other world leaders for random chats about nothing.
The leader of the free world, people!
Apparently Trump is particularly fond of calling up Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the middle of the afternoon, but has to be repeatedly told by aides that Abe is sleeping and that they’ll set up a phone call at a more appropriate time.
A former Trump official was quoted as saying “He wasn’t great with recognizing that the leader of a country might be 80 or 85 years old and isn’t going to be awake or in the right place at 10:30 or 11 p.m. their time. When he wants to call someone, he wants to call someone. He’s more impulsive that way. He doesn’t think about what time it is or who it is”.
Sounds like thinking isn’t exactly high on Trump’s agenda.
Despite being told repeatedly about a thing called “time zones”, Trump reportedly doesn’t care about those details and just wants to chat on the phone dammit.
While Trump reportedly likes to randomly call foreign leaders at a whim, the POTUS apparently has a “bizarre” fascination with chatting to French President Emmanuel Macron. Presumably this occurs every night when Trump is lying in bed and wondering whether Macron is up to.
The White House denies it, of course, an states that it was Macron who requested most of the calls. Uh huh, sure.
Beyond calling world leaders at random times of the day for small talk, Trump reportedly also made several faux pas when it comes to the pronunciation of country names. Now this isn’t uncommon and even the dearly missed Barack Obama has made mistakes when pronouncing names during his tenure as POTUS.
What makes Trump’s screw ups so noteworthy is that he somehow managed to mispronounce Nepal as “Nipple” and Bhutan as “Button” during a briefing ahead of meeting with India’s prime minister. I would get it if the country name were, say, Liechtenstein, but Nepal and Bhutan?
Not only did he mispronounce both country names, but he reportedly didn’t even know where Nepal and Bhutan were, and thought it was “all part of India”.
Needless to say, the White House has attempted to spin this all in defense of Trump by stating that he is in fact a very stable genius who simply likes to break past convention and protocols.
Call it what you will, White House, but you’re no closer to convincing us that Trump is not an idiot than he is at pronouncing “Nepal”.