Trump's Big CON: After an Isolated and Pampered Life, He is Clueless (and As We Are Learning a 'Bigly' Liar)

UPDATE:  "Donald Trump believed he could convince China to pressure North Korea to stop its nuclear activities. Then President Xi Jinping tutored him on the history of the region.

'After listening for 10 minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,' Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, recounting the session at Mar-a-Lago. 'You know, I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.'

This comment is funny because, in 2011, Trump claimed that he has read “hundreds of books about China over the decades,” including works by Henry Kissinger, American journalists and Chinese novelists. Looking to do more business with Beijing, he provided a list of 20 books about China to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, that he said had helped him understand the country, its politics and its people. 'I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind,' Trump said six years ago. His list had some surprising titles on it, including 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.'

Color me skeptical that Trump has read anything by Amy Chua."

Read the Washington Post, Trump doesn’t know much about history. It’s making his on-the-job training harder.

Just another example that "Trump tells the truth only when he cannot think of a lie."

"To Trump, the world is 'a mess,' as he said during a White House news conference this week with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. . .

'It’s crazy what’s going on,' Trump said. 'Whether it’s the Middle East or you look at — no matter where — Ukraine — whatever you look at, it’s got problems, so many problems.'

'Right now,' he concluded, 'it’s nasty.'

What a time to be alive.

To ordinary Americans, the gulf between the worldviews of the United States’ two most recent leaders could not be more vast.

But historians and foreign affairs analysts said that, despite their apparent contradictions, both things can be true. The world is always a mess. Bad things happen. There are crises. People die.

The question, they said, is how a president responds to the mess and how he frames the threat and the response to the public — a challenge made more difficult in an age of immediate and nonstop news from across the world.

'President Obama constantly reminded us that our own times are not uniquely oppressive,' said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and author at Rice University. 'There’s a feeling due to the 24-7 news cycle that everything is a crisis mode, when the fact of the matter is, Americans have it better now than ever before.'

Throughout his campaign, Trump railed about the dangers and threats to Americans: inside the country in the form of undocumented immigrants and violent inner cities, and abroad in the form of Islamic State terrorists, swarms of refugees and rapacious U.S. trading partners.

Time and again, Obama sought to counter Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric by putting the purported threats in broader context and cautioning Americans not to succumb to fear or anger. . .

A war here, an environmental disaster there, and suddenly 'everybody is shouting and everybody hates each other,' Obama said. 'And you get kind of depressed. You think, ‘Goodness, what’s happening?’?'

But, Obama emphasized, 'if you had a choice of when to be born and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, whether you were male or female, what religion — but you had said, ‘When in human history would be the best time to be born?’ — the time would be now.'"

Read the Washington Post, Obama said there was never a better time to be alive. Trump thinks a ‘nasty’ world offers nothing but problems.