‘What’s this a tour of?’ When President Donald Trump forgot what Pearl Harbour was

A Very Stable Genius, written by Washington Post reporters, notes Trump’s ‘knowledge’ of foreign affairs

The unflattering portrait is based on hundreds of interviews, backed up by diary entries, memos and even video diaries

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US President Donald Trump seemed unsure what Pearl Harbour was, according to new book A Very Stable Genius by The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP

Published: 12:25pm, 20 Jan 2020Updated: 12:25pm, 20 Jan 2020

US President Donald Trump did not appear to understand the significance of the iconic Pearl Harbour memorial in Hawaii during a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, according to a new book by two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters from The Washington Post.

The book, A Very Stable Genius, is an account from hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 200 sources, according to the Post. Some of its details, which paint an unflattering picture of the president’s knowledge of foreign affairs, were corroborated by “calendars, diary entries, internal memos and even private video recordings”, the Post reported.

According to the reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, Trump asked his then chief of staff, John Kelly, “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” “He was at times dangerously uninformed”, a former senior White House official said, according to the Post.

Trump appeared not to grasp that this was a hallowed tribute to the more than 2,400 US service members and civilians who died in the 1941 assault, a devastating surprise attack that launched America into World War II. In November 2017, Trump visited the site for the first time and claimed he “read about, spoken about, heard about, studied”.

The USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Photo: Kyodo

“And that is going to be very exciting for me,” Trump added at the time.

The battleship USS Arizona was attacked by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941, killing 1,177 US sailors and Marines. More than half of the casualties could not be recovered from the underwater site, where the ship remains.