Recently, Donald Trump apparently sent out the following bizarre tweet: “‘In politics, and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.’ This is a primary reason that President Obama is the worst president in U.S. history!”  When I first read it, I thought I was just the latest fool who had read an Onion spoof and mistaken it for a genuine news article.  But other sources have confirmed that this was an actual @realDonaldTrump tweet.

Several things are peculiar about the Trump tweet.  First, as posted before, not only is Obama not “the worst president in U.S. history” — he is not even the worst of the last two!  When George W. Bush took office, America was coming off an unprecedented run of peace and prosperity.  In his first year, we suffered the worst terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, and by the time he left office, the economy was in shambles, jobs were slashed, and we were fighting two wars that were no longer going well.

Second, what is Trump actually objecting to?  The fact that Obama said that ignorance is no virtue?  So does this mean that Trump believes that ignorance is a virtue, and that a president who thinks otherwise must therefore be terrible?  Perhaps someone who “loves the poorly educated” thinks that ignorance is a virtue, at least in the electorate.  This may actually be a reasonable position for someone to whom the fact checkers have not been kind.

Rather than being the party of Lincoln, who reportedly said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,”  Trump apparently wishes that the Republican Party were the party of H.L. Mencken, who is widely credited with saying, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Perhaps this is how Trump has accumulated his possibly vast wealth?

If he were aware of it, Trump would take even more comfort in the full Mencken quote:  “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” (Emphasis added.)  This could be the guiding principle for Trump in his campaign as well as in his business life.

It’s no wonder, then, that Trump took such umbrage to Obama’s comments.  As reported by Fox News, Obama expanded on the statement that had so offended Trump:

“‘In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue,’ Obama said. ‘It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. That’s not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you’re talking about,’ the president said.”

Had Trump read this full statement, he would have really gone over the edge.  Happily, he seems ignorant of it.  And if Trump wins in November, he promises his followers they will all be “living in a state of bliss.”  In a sense, he may be right.