Trump's True Colors
Time for a Left-Wing Conspiracy Theory:
This is the Russian flag:
Daniel Politi of Slate: "... Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visited children at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio as part of an effort to call attention to the way the opioid crisis affects infants. Plus, it’s always a good idea to have a photo-op with kids at the end of a no good, very bad week. For politicians it’s 'a time-honored tradition,' writes Esquire, 'sitting in tiny desks alongside adorable kids in hope that the guileless innocence on the little faces surrounding them will take some of the heat off of their craven politicking.' Yet things didn’t go so well for Trump this time. The president and his wife joined the children in an arts-and-crafts activity that involved coloring in the American flag. But it seems Trump didn’t quite color his flag right. A photo posted on Twitter seems to show that the president colored in a blue stripe on the U.S. flag.” Thanks to Akhilleus for the link.
Coloring Between the Lines. Let's look at these photos in chronological order:
1. This is Donald Trump coloring a stripe with a red marker:
You can see the red marker in his hand.
2. This is Donald Trump coloring a stripe with a blue marker:
This photo comes via the Raw Story. You can see the red stripe was completed earlier. Notice how intent Trump is on getting it right.
3. This is Donald Trump with his "finished product":
This photo comes from the Twitter feed of Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health & Human Services.
Here's a close-up from that photo:
You can see the blue marker Trump used.
Weirdly, Trump skipped a line. The colors on his flag are red, white, white, blue. As we all know, white is pretty important to Trump: white is more equal than others, you might say.
Okay, I'll admit Trump has painted the colors of the stripes in the Russian flag out of order. But you have to admit you've never seen a mentally-competent, adult, native-born, U.S.-educated person who thinks some of the stripes in the stars and stripes are blue.
Trump's coloring exercise was a Freudian slip. It showed his true colors. They're Russian. We've seen a great deal of evidence Trump is a Russian asset. But this slip-up is like total proof, man. He's a sleeper.
*****
Here's Akhilleus's take:
You might think that a president* who threatens people for “disrespecting” the flag would have at least a vague clue what that symbol looks like.
You’d be wrong.
Here are photos that show Trump the Patriot demonstrating for little kids in a classroom that they should color the stripes on the American flag red, white, and, um, blue.
Hope he didn’t try to help them spell potato.
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Trump has always been hazy about the American flag he now claims to cherish so much it deeply disturbs him when NFL take a knee to honor the equality it represents to most of us.
In this clip from about ten years ago, Stephen Colbert revealed what Trump really knew about the American flag:
... How would he know? When I was in grade school learning what the 13 stripes represented, little Donald was -- somewhere else.
P.S. This is a joke. The real reason Trump has absolutely no knowledge of the American flag is that he's an ignorant narcissist who, in all fairness, probably has a severe learning disability that explains his inability to read the presidential briefing books and accurately color an American flag. *
... *Update: Be sure to see the Comments below for better explanations.
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Reader Comments (8)
No. It's not a joke. This looks like the kind of errors we see in Alzheimers patients. Inability to sustain repetitive patterns, errors in common patterns, etc. Ask Donnie to draw the face of a clock: betcha he can't.
Apologia for DiJiT and the flag:
-- the little kids gave him the markers to use. He was too polite to refuse to use the blue marker on a stripe, and he didn't want to hog the blue canton to himself because that's the most fun to color
-- he noticed the spectrum banner on the wall and thought it would be creative to color the stripes that way. But then he realized the ROYGBIV would create a gay pride banner, and he didn't want the kids to think that its OK to color gay. So he stopped with blue
-- he is totally color blind since birth, which is the real reason he flunked his draft physical. His doc made up the bone spurs thing to hide his real weakness from the other real estate predators
-- he wanted to honor the police by creating a "blue line" flag, but he miscounted the lines and put the line too high in the field
-- he is signing an executive order this week to change the flag to alternate blue and red stripes, to seek to reduce political division in the country ("its not fair that they're all red"), and wanted to give the kids an early demo
-- he's not an idiot -- you're an idiot
We have to give the president* credit for getting two stripes correct.
The red one at the top and the white one just below it. That's 2
out of 13.
To figure IQ, the mental age is divided by the chronological age and
then multiplied by 100. I figure he's not quite as smart as those 8
year olds at the table, so about a 7 divided by 72= .097, multiplied
by 100= 9.7 IQ. Isn't that about right?
@forrest morris: I'd do the math differently & give the President* way more credit. Theoretically, the highest possible IQ score is about 195. (A few people have scored higher, but we'll stick with the theoretical high score.) The highest possible number of stripes to "get right" is 13, so a U.S.-reared genius would get all 13 right. (Okay, so would many a dummy, but we'll forget that. Also, I don't know how many markers the staff made available to Trump; if they gave him, say, seven colors, the "test" would have been way harder than if they'd give him only two -- blue & red).
Anyhow, giving Trump all the benefit of the doubt, he got two out of 13 stripes right, as you point out. So Trump got about 15.4% right. 15.4% of 195 (the theoretical highest IQ) = about 30. So I'd say Trump has an IQ of about 30. Way smarter than you estimated.
Viewed another way, Trump didn't finish his project; he decided on the colors of only four stripes. He got the first two right. He got the second two wrong. That would make his IQ half of 195, or 97.5. That might be about accurate.
Then again, if you gave the test to a random sampling of Americans, most of them would probably get it right, though I'm sure some would switch the red & the white; that is, they would color in 6 red stripes & leave 7 white/blank. So that would probably put Trump in one of the lowest percentiles.
@Bea: I'll see your 30 and raise you 10. We'll call 40 the
combined IQ of donald and eric.
One might think that a visit to a hospital in the middle Opioid Death Land might yield something more substantial than a photo op with kids. But then...
My brother points out that those two little girls next to Trumpy ( the next to last pic above) appear to be having a conversation. “Look, this fat man with the funny hair doesn’t even know how to color the flag!” “Maybe he’s an immigrant.”
Mouths of babes, as they say.
@Akhilleus: I hate to think what would have happened if one of the kiddies had challenged Trump's artwork: "Hey, Mister, you colored the flag wrong!" Surely Melanie would have to invoke her anti-bullying chops & maybe even the Secret Service would have had to entry the fray -- to protect the children.
@forrest morris: I fold. Can't beat your argument.
King Trumpy’s inability to assign the correct colors to the stripes on the American flag is all of a piece with his ignorance of the words of the national anthem (“Oh say can you see! By, um, something, something, something, what do Trumpy we something, while something, something happened...” and leave us not forget that not only has he never even bothered to skim the Constitution, he has no idea how many articles are contained therein or what they say or mean.
He avers that Andrew Jackson would have stopped the Civil War, a guy who offered a bounty on one of his runaway slaves and who offered extra cash on the barrel head to anyone who, after catching that ungrateful darky, could demonstrate that he had beaten and tortured said slave.
The litany of historical ignorance on Trump’s part would flunk him on the easiest 5th grade history test you could imagine.
Yet this is the imbecilic slug so many winger haters worship
As a gr8t ‘merrycan.
I’m thinking now of the importance and utility of a famous manual of statecraft, “Thinking in Time” by authors Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, per a review in Commentary, 1986:
“In particular, the authors of Thinking in Time wish to help decision-makers become more attentive to the proper ‘uses of history.’ When they consider the pressing matters before them, officials frequently have historical analogies in mind. These analogies help shape the way they look at, judge, and act on the problems at hand. But Neustadt and May find that often the analogies do not fit or are improperly applied to contemporary situations. The result is a distortion of policy. Their goal, therefore, is not so much to persuade officials to refer to historical examples—this, they believe, happens all the time anyway—as to make them more aware of the particular historical models that are shaping their perspective. Beyond that, the authors suggest several analytic principles which should serve to clarify the ways in which a particular historical example is similar to or differs from the situation to which it is being applied.”
The problem, with Trump and his acolytes, both in the administration and in the Confederate controlled Congress is that historical references, models, and examples are either completely made up or non-existent.