Bill Gates Recounts His Meetings With Trump

From Esquire

Look, no one expects the current president to be an expert in infectious disease-or any field of study, really. No one even really expects to get an honest medical report out of him. But surely we can expect him to remember things?

As Chris Hayes made clear on Twitter, Trump asked Gates the exact same question in both meetings they had.

It's almost like he doesn't absorb much of anything unless, of course, it directly involves Donald Trump. Or he doesn't care. Or he thinks he already knows everything worth knowing. Nobody knew this could all be so complicated, and all that. The White House's current occupant is fundamentally incurious about the world on a level that we may never have seen as a nation.

George W. Bush, for instance, oversaw an initiative to fight AIDS in Africa during his presidency that saved millions of lives. He certainly knew the difference between human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can lead to AIDS, and human papillomavirus (HPV), a group of 150 related viruses that can cause warts or lead to cancer. We might not expect this level of knowledge from an average citizen, though it would be nice. But normally, it's safe to say, we would expect it from the President of the United States of America.

Sadly, though, no one will be shocked by this. The president's defenders, and the anti-anti-Trump "intellectuals" of newspaper opinion pages, will dismiss the criticism as elitism or whatever. Nothing to see here. What is genuinely surprising, in a way, is that Trump did not remember his prior conversation with one of the world's premier Extremely Rich Guys-one of Trump's favorite groups, and one whose members even still might make him go starry-eyed.

Instead, he apparently thought Bill Gates was AskJeeves. We could not confirm whether Trump also asked Gates when the Royal Wedding starts.

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