tRump on reading the Constitution: "It's like a foreign language."

[Fritz Walter]

Vanity Fair shared an excerpt from the book, A Very Stable Genius:

"While being filmed for a documentary, the president stumbled through his chosen passage, taking his frustration out on everyone around him, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig write...

"With LED lights on stilts in front of him, Trump took his seat. “You’re lucky you got the easy part,” (director Alexandra) Pelosi (daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) told him cheerfully. “It gets complicated after this.” But the president stumbled, trying to get out the words in the arcane, stilted form the founding fathers had written. Trump grew irritated. “It’s very hard to do because of the language here,” Trump told the crew. “It’s very hard to get through that whole thing without a stumble.” He added, “It’s like a different language, right?” The cameraman tried to calm Trump, telling him it was no big deal, to take a moment and start over. Trump tried again, but again remarked, “It’s like a foreign language.”

"The section, like many parts of the Constitution, was slightly awkward—an anachronistic arrangement of words that don’t naturally trip off the tongue. Members of the crew exchanged looks, trying not to be obvious. Some believed Trump would eventually get it, but others were more concerned. The president, already bristling about his missteps, was getting angry. He chided the crew, accusing them of distracting him. “You know, your paper was making a lot of noise. It’s tough enough,” Trump said.

“Every time he stumbled, he manufactured something to blame people,” another person in the room recalled. “He never said, ‘Sorry, I’m messing this up.’ [Other] people would screw up and say, ‘Ohhhh, I’m sorry.’ They would be self-effacing. He was making up excuses and saying there were distracting sounds.… He was definitely blaming everyone for his inability to get through it. That was prickly, or childish.” Though stiff, he eventually made it through without any errors.

"Trump presented a stark contrast to many other readers, including the Supreme Court associate justice Stephen Breyer, who read as if he knew the full text by heart, and Senator Ted Cruz, who “knew it from beginning to end” as a result of performing dramatic readings of the Constitution as a high school student, according to Pelosi. “Donald Trump is a celebrity and he came to perform,” she said. “He had not practiced it beforehand. I don’t think anyone would show up to read the Constitution without practicing it first.”

(emphasis added)

That HBO documentary is available on-line here, but the site requires an email address to view it.

IMPEACH appears at 27:05, where he somehow managed to get through the script without stumbling.

[SWBTATTReg]

1. And this so called business expert w/ all of his supposed $Billions, doesn't know how to read,

e.g., contracts and the like? He really has lied about his supposed wealth. Anyone that deals w/ assets and / or money etc., knows that there are a slew of contractual items etc. that must be dealt with on an ongoing basis. What a moron and a liar.

[Buns_of_Fire]

5. Luckily (for him) daddy Fred left him enough money to hire people

to do everything for him. All he had to concentrate on was being the biggest asshole he could be (and in this, all can agree that he succeeded beyond all expectations).

[smirkymonkey]

2. K&R

[nykym]

3. It was reported that

the phone sitting on his desk in that reality show he stared in was used to give him his lines when he forgot them.

[MineralMan]

4. The Constitution was written in the 18th century, in the English educated people

used in that period. It's perfectly intelligible to educated people today, but reads differently than newspaper English in the 21st century. I've read the Constitution more times than I can count, but if I had to read it on camera, I'd do a rehearsal reading before taping.

It's something like reading Shakespeare, although that was written even earlier. Shakespeare plays include words we no longer use, and that most people don't know, unless they read that sort of thing often. The Constitution has some odd spelling that was used in the time it was written, too, but none of that should slow anyone down, especially if they read it through a time or two.

Trump is not illiterate, but he is also not fully literate in terms of his vocabulary and his familiarity with more formal English. He should have rehearsed a little and asked questions when he didn't understand what he was reading.

[KentuckyWoman]

6. The US Constitution is more than 280 characters.

And it certainly won't fit on a ball cap.

Why would he bother?

[Guilded Lilly]

7. It is a foreign language to him: English...

Miserable moron.

[Takket]

8. Is this for real?

Why the hell would he be doing a documentary with Pelosi’s daughter?

[lostnfound]

9. I'm sure it's for real. She's a filmmaker who does things like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Pelosi

[blogslut]

10. The most important document of our nation.

And he has no respect for it whatever.