Politico has published a comprehensive investigation of the president’s knowledge of the outside world, coming to some alarming conclusions. “Several times in the first year of his administration, President Donald Trump wanted to call Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the middle of the afternoon,” the news outlet reports. “But there was a problem. Midafternoon in Washington is the middle of the night in Tokyo—when Abe would be fast asleep.”
The president had a hard time being cognizant of time-zones and other basic information about foreign nations and leaders. “He wasn’t great with recognizing that the leader of a country might be 80 or 85 years old and isn’t going to be awake or in the right place at 10:30 or 11 p.m. their time,” a former Trump NSC official told Politico. “When he wants to call someone, he wants to call someone. He’s more impulsive that way. He doesn’t think about what time it is or who it is.”
Basic geography is also a problem for the president. Shown a map of Asia, he was puzzled by the nations nestled next to India, Nepal and Bhutan. “What is this stuff in between and these other countries?” he asked advisors. When informed of their names, the president took to calling those countries Nipple and Button. In the same spirit, Trump also imitated the accent of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
James Carafano, vice president for foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation, defended the president’s lack of rudimentary knowledge of the outside world. “If people are looking for more polish and more kind of conventional statecraft and that’s their metric for Trump learning, I think they’re going to be disappointed,” Carafano told Politico. “I don’t think he sees those as faux pas; I think he sees them as, ‘Look, I do things differently.’ If you say, ‘That’s not how things are done,’ he says, ‘Who says? Where is it written down that I can’t do that?’”