No more reader-in-chief: After Obama, Trump the nonreader amounts a real national loss [View all]

[applegrove]

No more reader-in-chief: After Obama, Trump the nonreader amounts a real national loss

by Jason Howard at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/02/no-more-reader-in-chief-after-obama-trump-the-nonreader-is-a-real-national-loss/

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Numerous press accounts have detailed Trump’s aversion to sitting down with a book, either for pleasure or study. In fact, he has often boasted of rarely reading or preparing. In a summer interview with The Washington Post, Trump admitted that despite being the then-presumptive Republican nominee, he had never read a presidential biography and made little time for reading in general. “I never have,” he confessed. “I’m always busy doing a lot. Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.”

One is tempted to give Trump credit for his candor. After all, some have argued, an insatiable reader does not a president make, and our republic has survived previous presidents who did not put much stock in reading and scholarship. But this is a different age, one accompanied by heightened expectations of what our president must do and represent.

Trump’s personal antipathy to reading might not have carried much symbolic value in the rarified world he inhabits as a businessman. But such a view is both hypocritical and damaging for a president who is the leader of the nation’s higher education policies. His disavowal of reading telegraphs to our children and society that books — and the people who write them — are not to be valued. It undermines the young artists who need to know that their craft matters and the teachers attempting to instill a respect for reading in their students.

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The answer is that reading builds understanding. It tears down walls instead of building them, and in this increasingly globalized and fractured world, we should all be reading more, especially our president. Make no mistake: Valuing literature and history will not be a political fail-safe for Trump or future presidents against making strategic miscalculations and policy blunders.



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