There with all his friends
Oh gawd. Trump went to Yad Vashem today. He wrote an entry for the guest book, in all caps:
IT IS A GREAT HONOR TO BE HERE WITH ALL OF MY FRIENDS — SO AMAZING & WILL NEVER FORGET!
"So amazing," Trump describes Yad Vashem visit as only he canhttps://t.co/qezNcuuIcM pic.twitter.com/qGo7ZielBA
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) May 23, 2017
The guest book entry provides an opportunity to contrast Trump’s style with that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, who spent an hour at Yad Vashem and gave an emotional speech in 2013. Obama had already visited once, in 2008, when he was an Illinois senator running for president. On that trip, he left this note in the guest book:
“I am grateful to Yad Vashem and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim ‘never again’. And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit.”
I’m not crazy about that one either, frankly. Saying we’re “blessed” to have the reminder implies the Holocaust was itself a blessing, or at least a necessary step to attaining that blessing. Still, it’s orders of magnitude less grating than Trump’s little ego-pirouette.
No, it’s worse than that – it’s a riot of upper and lower case. Here:
IT is A gReAT HONOR TO Be HeRe WiTH ALL OF My FRieNDS – So AMAZiNg & WILL NeveR FoRgeT!
The letters are mostly upper case except for g, e, and i. The letters that look the same in upper or lower case had to be inferred from their size relative to the rest of the letters of that word… which caused me to notice that the size style varies from line to line.
I can understand not bothering with cursive, but holy shit this guy barely knows how to goddamn print.
And of course there is still the matter of the vapidity and shallowness of the message!
For shallow self-absorption, that ranks up there with Justin Bieber’s comment in the Anne Frank museum guestbook.
Vapid? Shallow? Are you speaking of the statesman-scholar who made this pronouncement today?
Can someone tell this mope how Wikipedia works? You can actually find useful information about things.
On Facebook, comedy writer Josh Greenberg posted Trump and Bieber’s notes side by side, with this comment:
“Hello! Here’s the actual note that Trump left at Israel’s Holocaust Memorial yesterday and the note Justin Bieber left at the Anne Frank House in 2013. Let’s remember that one was written by a naive and narcissistic child, while the other was written by Justin Bieber.”
Bieber’s note at the Anne Frank House in 2013, in case you’ve forgotten:
That’s not even something as sophisticated as an ampersand – it’s a plus-sign without lifting his pen from the paper.
To be fair, tiggerthewing, that is exactly how I was taught to make an ampersand in grade school – and no one ever taught me otherwise as I got older. It was standard. The fact that I now don’t make an ampersand that way is merely the fact of my paying attention as I got older, but I did make it that way throughout grade school. So he was probably taught that, too (though he is well more than a decade older than I am, but I doubt it was that different when he went to school). He just didn’t, you know, alter his way of doing it, because paying attention isn’t part of his skill set.