President Trump “misspelled ‘counsel’ three times and had five errors in the span of 280 characters. As journalists and others poked fun at the mistakes, the president quickly deleted the tweet and posted an edited version. He successfully changed ‘wether’ to ‘whether’ and eliminated an inadvertent repeat of the word ‘the’—but he failed to correct three inaccurate references to the title of his nemesis, Robert S. Mueller III.”
—Washington Post story, “A casualty of Trump’s White House: Spelling,” March 22, 2018
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I walk our dog every morning to a nearby park that’s close enough to an affluent neighborhood that one of the dog walkers is among the richest men in the nation’s capital. He’s a real estate developer; he builds big condo and apartment buildings in the Washington suburbs.
One morning a group of us got talking about college and several of us admitted we hadn’t done all that well academically. The real estate developer said he had barely made it through his Boston college (Babson, unranked by U.S. News among business schools).
“You have to remember,” he added, “that those of us who went into real estate were the C students.”
He was smiling as he said it to the lawyer standing with us who had received top grades at an Ivy League law school, thereby attracting a recruiter from a top DC law firm.
The nation’s capital increasingly is full of people who had top grades at the best schools. At social gatherings the two questions most asked are “What do you do?” and “Where’d you go to school?”
“What do you do?” lets you know if the person is worth talking with at all and “Where’d you go to school?” gives a reading on just how smart and accomplished this person is. In the Clinton and Obama years, Harvard and Yale ruled.
We’re very smart in the nation’s capital and we can’t believe that those deplorable voters in 32 states sent us what amounts to a C student, a real estate developer who can’t even spell correctly.
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P.S. In the 2016 election, only 4 percent of Washington, D.C., residents voted for Donald Trump. As federal power and spending have increased over the past 50 years and Washington has attracted more and more smart people from top colleges, the nation’s capital has increasingly voted more Democratic. As a DC journalist for the past 50 years, I’d argue that Washington journalism has trended the same direction, especially at the Washington Post.
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