He doesn’t have the time
More on that old favorite, Trump’s hatred of reading:
After failing to read about the coronavirus, Trump failed to respond to it. It’s not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved.
Trump’s ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, speculated that Trump has never read a single book in his adult life, not even a book about him or “by” him, of which there are 17. Trump pretends to have written more books than he pretends to have read.
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When Megyn Kelly asked him about the last book he read, Trump replied, “I read passages. I read areas. I’ll read chapters. I don’t have the time.” Trump didn’t have time to read the last book he read.
Well, to be fair, reading a book takes up to several hours.
Reading — even about oneself — requires focus, and Trump has none. “It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes,” Schwartz said.
We’ve noticed. He can’t focus long enough to finish his own sentences – he interrupts himself with a new train of thought mid-sentence, to the frequent befuddlement of onlookers.
Trump’s non-reading evinces not stupidity so much as incuriosity. Narcissists are easily bored, and Trump is no exception. In his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, which he didn’t write, Trump says that travel, exercise, and successful people bore him. “I get bored too easily,” he says. “My attention span is short.”
Can you imagine being bored by travel?
Trump’s former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email, “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
He seems to read some tweets though. That’s pretty impressive.
Didn’t his second wife {Marla Marples] claim he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches on his bed table?
Perhaps he had a bad day in kindergarten as a toddler and never got over it. Nor through it. Nor beyond it. Still, as long as the White House library is well stocked with crayons and picture books he can colour in, things should not get too bad. Also photos of his opponents that he can decorate with goatee beards, mustaches and crossed eyes; stuff like that.
#1. He also kept a personal jet aircraft in a hangar but I bet he’s never piloted the thing.
He has people; people to fly his tacky gold-painted Boeing for him, people to write his books for him, people to pay off former lovers for him, people to read Hitler to him……
I’m kind of bored by travel. It seems to be a lot of effort to get somewhere that’s not that different from where I was before, or where I’ve already been. But that’s because I’m old, presumably. When I travel it’s usually for an event (these days almost always to speak at a conference–it’s my excuse to go somewhere), or to visit a specific thing, rather than just to experience being in another place.
One thing that reading does is expand one’s vocabulary. It’s obvious from Donnie’s seventy-word quiver that he’s never read a single thing in his life.
I can’t imaging being bored by travel; on the actual moving bits there is almost always something to look at, and always something to do if there isn’t a view. And upon arrival there is always something new to look at and do.
Actually, I have trouble being bored with anything. I’m always far too busy doing things to be bored. I’m usually doing several things at once. Even when I have been seriously ill in hospital, incapable of doing anything else, I was too busy staying alive to be bored!
I can imagine (and recall) being bored on a plane, if you’re not in a window seat or if clouds block all the view…but other than that it’s all pretty interesting to me. I just like seeing what’s out there.
I don’t get bored on the plane if the flight is short enough, because I always have lots to read. But on the long flights, even reading can get boring after a time, especially since the seats are small, the person next to me is always manspreading (even if it’s my husband, who responds to gentle nudging but forgets again quickly), and my arthritis always starts to act up because of the cramped position. But travel itself doesn’t bore me, because it is always exciting to be someplace new.