There are far more important issues to discuss. But in these divided times, surely we can all come together for a brief moment and agree that President Donald Trump's "dumb" story makes no sense.
Trump has been saying it over and over for months, straight-faced and dead serious, as he tries to brand Democrats as "Dumocrats." The president who has a long history of asserting nobody knew things lots of people actually knew is this time declaring that…nobody knows, or at least most people don't know, that "dumb" ends with the letter B.
"Most people don't know that 'dumb' has a B at the end," he told Republican lawmakers at the White House on Wednesday. "You know, they think it's D-U-M, and that's okay."
"Most people don't know that 'dumb' has a B," he said at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in July.
"Nobody knows that 'dumb' has a B," he said in a New York Post interview in June.
"Most people don't know that, you know, 'dumb' ends with a B. But most people don't know," he said in a Fox News interview in May.
To be very generous to Trump, his "most people" claim cannot be authoritatively fact-checked because there has not been a national spelling test on the word "dumb." And it's certainly true that some Americans struggle with literacy in general and spelling in particular.
But…come on here. "Dumb"? A common four-letter word kids learn in grade school? Most people know how to spell "dumb." This is obvious.
So why is the president of the United States going out of his way to establish a fantasy world in which most people don't know – or even that nobody knows – a thing most people clearly know?
We don't believe the critics who claim it's because Trump himself just learned "dumb" has a B. Rather, it's more likely this nonsense is a product of the president's insistence on being constantly and universally viewed as brilliant – that someone questioned the wisdom of "Dumocrat," his preferred spelling of the juvenile insult, and he preferred to justify it by making the public sound woefully ignorant rather than admit this might not be his finest nicknaming work.
"If you replace the E with a U, instead of Democrat you have Dumocrat," the president explained on Tuesday, as he has on multiple previous occasions. "And most people don't know that 'dumb' has a B at the end. You know, they think it's D-U-M, and that's okay. So it's a one-letter change and you go no more E, you just put a D, and you got a Dumocrat."
We'll never know for certain what is happening here. Which is fine given how dumb this whole thing is.
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