Trump keeps denying he's read 'Mein Kampf'—which means he probably has

It’s really easy to believe Donald Trump hasn’t read a book. It’s marginally less easy, of course, when that book was written by Adolf Hitler. So what, then, should we make of Trump’s repeated insistence that he’s never read Hitler’s seminal manifesto, “Mein Kampf”?

On the one hand—in wording that strongly echoes his most ardent fans’ fave Teutonic twit—Trump keeps saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and that’s far too coherent a phrase for him to have come up with on his own. On a good day, the best Trump’s brain might conjure is “brown man bad, steal my Lucky Charms.” On the other hand, Tony Schwartz, who ghost ghoul-wrote Trump’s “Art of the Deal” and spent 18 months closely observing the guy, once remarked, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”   

But while the truth remains clouded, we do know that Trump denying he knows things, people, and organizations he’s almost certainly familiar with is part of a very well-established pattern. On Friday, Trump joined conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who’s about what you’d get if Trump’s personal bathtub attendant had an 8chan podcast, to blurt out that he’d never read “Mein Kampf,” even though literally no one was asking.