Dedication

Trump has had a busy day not believing things he hasn’t read.

President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed a study produced by his own administration, involving 13 federal agencies and more than 300 leading climate scientists, warning of the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change.

Why, you ask?

“I don’t believe it,” Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read “some” of the report.

The cover, maybe?

Anyway. There is more than one kind of not believing. There’s the kind that involves knowledge of the thing to be believed or not believed, and then there’s the other kind. You can count on Trump to practice always the other kind.

If you missed the study’s release, well, that was the point. It was originally slated to be made public next month but was suddenly released on the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, when the country shops, eats, hangs with family and pays a total of zero attention to what’s going on in politics. Outside of Christmas and the actual day of Thanksgiving, there’s no better day to drop bad news that you don’t want people to see.

Trump’s willingness to ignore the conclusions of experts because it doesn’t jibe with what he wants the truth to be isn’t isolated to just the climate. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the unanimous conclusion of the country’s intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help him and hurt Hillary Clinton. And of late, he has chosen to ignore the CIA’s conclusion that Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.

He makes it easy for himself to ignore the conclusions of experts by not finding out anything about them.

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