worth noting that trump is also hawking gold wafers with his face and seal on them from the oval office and judging by the photo linked in the article, he may have given one to macron? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/u...

and the case for the calculator is that once you’ve internalized the concept of the real number line and division/multiplication/exponentials you can skip those rote crunchings play with larger equations and concepts. But math is pretty uniquely hierarchical knowledge.

Struggling with the calculator analogy; one issue is when a calculator does the commanded operation, it does that and that only. You can also specify the degree of precision of the answe exactly, and reproduce the rounding and chopping algorithms yourself on paper.

I think passing over these comments in silence forms one of the low level support columns for media normalizing higher level disgrace/venom/crime from him ("just trump being trump"). Journalists need to say every time "wait pause, what do you mean by that? Why are you saying that?"