Law&Crime previously reported on another controversial-and arguably more substantive-excerpt from the same book. Katyal’s commentary suggests a self-referential and personally-reinforcing feedback loop undergirding Trump’s disdain for constitutional competence and diligence. Solicitor General Neal Katyal described the president’s apparent lack of familiarity with the nation’s founding charter as “ meta.” Trump has been denounced and condemned by critics of various ideological stripes throughout his political career for disrespecting and ignoring the U.S. Filming occurred in the White House Blue Room some six weeks after Trump was sworn in on the same document he reportedly struggled to read.įormer acting U.S. Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had set up the reading as part of a documentary titled The Words That Built America-which the book describes as a “conceit” premised on the idea that America’s “founding documents remained a unifying force for the nation’s factions” in the aftermath of the relatively ugly and decidedly divisive 2016 presidential election. Trump tried again, but again remarked, “It’s like a foreign language.” “It’s very hard to get through that whole thing without a stumble.” He added, “It’s like a different language, right?” The cameraman tried to calm Trump, telling him it was no big deal, to take a moment and start over.

“It’s very hard to do because of the language here,” Trump told the crew. “It gets complicated after this.” But the president stumbled, trying to get out the words in the arcane, stilted form the founding fathers had written. “You’re lucky you got the easy part,” Pelosi told him cheerfully. With LED lights on stilts in front of him, Trump took his seat. The following excerpt from A Very Stable Genius details an extended bit of grousing: “You know, your paper was making a lot of noise,” Trump complained of the script. While seemingly self-inflicted, Trump tended to blame those missteps on others in the room with him-including the film crew. Constitution while filming a documentary produced by Alexandra Pelosi, according to a recent book written by Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. President Donald Trump struggled to read through a passage of the U.S.

Trump never read the constitution