Trump has for weeks been making the rounds, bragging that he can repeat the words Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV in English and that such makes him a very stable genius.
“You go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ If you get it in order you get extra points. They say nobody gets it in order. It’s is actually not that easy but for me it was. And that’s not an easy question…They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?’ I have, like, a good memory … I’m cognitively there,” Trump boasted in a recent interview.
Well, I have news for him. When I was barely one year old, I could recite the words Carne. Chicho. Pan. at dinner time, in Spanish, slamming my little hands on the tray of my high chair demanding, of course, my “carne, chicho, pan.” I am now told that by “chicho” I meant “queso” and not one of my native country’s adult beverages, “chicha.” I guess I’ll have to take their word for it since I did not write it down.
Moreover, I repeated those words not once, but every night at dinner time. Unlike Trump, I did not get “extra points” for getting them “in order” — not even for using a foreign language — and I don’t remember my parents going around bragging to the world that their toddler was “cognitively all there.”
Well, “I count only three words,” some “Trumpistas” will say. “Our genius’ vocabulary is five-words-long.”
I must remind them, however, that when I aced my cognitive test, night after night, I was barely one year old and that, according to the experts:
By the time [a] baby is a year old, he or she is probably saying between one to three words. They will be simple, and not complete words, but you will know what they mean.
Bingo! With my three words in a foreign language, not only did I max the standard, but my parents — thank God — did clearly know what I meant: queso and not chicha.
Ah, the same Trump adorers will say, “But, but Trump bigly remembered five words, including ‘car’ and ‘TV,’ and you only remembered three.”
If the Trump “cultistas” would only realize that, in 1940, cars were extremely rare in my native country and television service did not start until 1959, they would be a little more fair when comparing the mental acuity of a one-year-old toddler to that of a 74-year-old baby, and president of the United States.
Finally — and now I may be bragging myself — had I been introduced to religion at such a tender age, I would have known that it is “Second Corinthians” and not “Two Corinthians” and had I already emigrated to my dream country, I would have added a fourth word to my repertoire, “Yosemite,” and pronounced it properly.
Had the year been 2020, I might have included in my repertoire a fifth word, “Impeach.”
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The writer was born in Ecuador, educated in The Netherlands and now calls an already Great America his home.
