MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said he once asked Donald Trump, before he was president, whether he could read.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post published Thursday night, Scarborough said he and his co-host Mika Brzezinski met with Trump in September 2015 after a “bumbling debate performance” during the Republican presidential primaries.
“Can you read?” Scarborough said he asked Trump. He said there was an “awkward silence” before continuing.
“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read? If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”
Scarborough said Trump was “taken aback” and held up a Bible that his mother gave him and “joked that he read it all the time.”
The anecdote comes in light of a new book by journalist Michael Wolff that repeatedly suggests Trump is not well-read and may be incapable of absorbing important information for carrying out presidential business.
In November, Trump was asked by reporters about his TV-watching habits.
Though Trump often tweets in the morning about cable TV news programming, particularly about what’s on Fox News, he said he does not watch much TV.
“Primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents. A lot,” he said, “I actually read much more — I read you people [journalists] much more than I watch television.”
