With Trump the ordinary rules don’t apply. Mere scandals are hardly worth reporting—the GOP will protect him regardless of what’s he’s done. But yesterday brought something a bit novel, even for Trump.
Trump lied to Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, claiming the US ran a trade deficit with Canada.
Then Trump joked about the fact that he lied to Trudeau. It was caught on tape, and it was played on all the TV news shows.
Then he repeated the lie in a tweet.
If you want to claim that it’s not a lie, that we do have a trade deficit with Canada, you are faced with the following problem. The “Economic Report of the President” signed by Trump, claims the US has a trade surplus with Canada. So he’s either lying in the Economic Report of the President, or in his tweets.
All this supports Bryan Caplan’s case against public education. One of the most common arguments for public schools is that they teach civics. We need a well educated population so that we do not elect bad people. And having gone through the public school system, I can vouch for the fact that they do teach civic virtue. My teachers seemed to sincerely want us to be good people. English classes taught us the importance of character. In history and social science we learned about various figures who gained power through demagoguery, demonizing minorities, engaging in “the big lie”. Lots of historical examples were cited. Indeed if I think back to my middle and high school years, I’d sum up the education as basically emphasizing one point:
Under no circumstances should you ever, ever, ever consider electing a candidate like Donald Trump.
And yet we did. He’s a textbook example of everything we were taught is bad. The continual lying, the bullying, the corruption, the racism, the misogyny, the willful ignorance. Either Trump is bad or public education is useless.
I vote for “both”.