Like Barack Obama, Donald Trump is convinced that he is the smartest person in the room. Any room. So it is that when he entered the lair of Chris Matthews, the schnook who confessed to experiencing an orgasm when he heard Obama’s voice, and was asked to name the three main functions of the federal government, the big oaf mentioned national security, health and education.

Well, a .333 batting average will get a baseball player into Cooperstown, but when you’re hoping to be the GOP candidate for president, it’s strictly bush league.

Whereas some people might say that Trump was simply unprepared for the question, the truth is he was only unprepared to lie. After all, what sort of Republican would ever suggest that health care and education should be managed by Washington? Only a “Republican” flying under false colors.

Those happen to be the “New York values” Ted Cruz referred to a while back before he let himself be blindsided by Trump’s reference to New York’s first responders, whose courage should never be questioned, but is no different from the courage of their colleagues in L.A., Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas or Oklahoma City.

Inasmuch as Trump was a registered Democrat for most of his life and has lived in one or another of his ivory towers for a great many years, the question is whether he’s ever even met a Republican before deciding he’d deign to be our Commander-in-chief.

So far as I’m concerned, the last thing the Oval Office really needs is a 69-year-old apprentice.

It’s no coincidence that the Hollywood blacklist coincided with the onslaught of TV in the late 40s and early 50s. To understand the threat that TV posed, you need to know that during WWII, roughly 90 million Americans went to the movies every week. Five years later, even with the return of all those young men who’d been busy waging war, that number had been slashed nearly in half.

The studios were in a panic. But there was some relief to be found in the boilerplate of the standard studio contract. It was the morals clause. In earlier times, it had been exercised if a studio employee got himself or herself involved in a murder or a particularly sleazy sex scandal that was so newsworthy, even the studios couldn’t keep it buried no matter how much hush money they spread around.

But in the wake of the Cold War, the cash-strapped studios didn’t need to have a leading man caught in the raid of a homosexual steam bath or a leading lady outed as a lesbian. It was enough that a writer, director or star, was or could be easily accused of being in league with America’s archenemy, the Soviet Union.

To listen to Hollywood’s current crop of leftist goony birds, the blacklist was tantamount to a second Holocaust. For all the rending of well-tailored garments, a handful of the actual Communists served a few months in a federal pen for contempt of Congress. The others either made their way to Broadway, London, Mexico or Italy, where they continued to work, though not for the same extravagant salaries they had become accustomed to during the gravy years.

Even today, 60 years later, they’re still making movies about the period, writing books about it and Written By, the Writer’s Guild self-aggrandizing monthly, continues to devote entire issues to the topic, which merely highlights the fact that Hollywood is the most pathologically narcissistic community in the world.

By contrast, just a few years prior to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) descending on Hollywood, seeking scalps and headlines, tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent had been rounded up, had their property confiscated and been thrown into concentration camps.

In spite of which, a great many of their young men enlisted in the U.S. Army and were sent to Europe to fight the Nazis. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most decorated unit of its size and length of service in the history of American warfare. The Regiment, whose numbers ultimately numbered 14,000, received 9,486 Purple Hearts. They also earned an extraordinary 21 Medals of Honor.

And while it’s true that MGM did make a movie, “Go for Broke,” which was the Regiment’s motto, and a few documentarians did memorialize the shameful camps and their aging survivors, Hollywood’s real heroes remained those pampered poodles who spent the war earning thousands of dollars-a-week making movies and tithing the Soviet Union.

I have often marveled at how much more candid and transparent Russia’s president is than ours. But even Iran’s Ayatollah Khomenei earned high marks for plain speaking when he declared: “Those who say the future is in negotiations, not missiles, are either ignorant or traitors.”

In the case of Barack Obama, it’s not a question of “either/or,” but of “and.”

One of the questions that keep me up nights is trying to figure out where and when do the Clintons spend their money. It’s no secret that since exiting the White House in 2001, they have amassed hundreds of millions of dollars. Even during her four years at the State Department, the money kept flooding into their greedy hands, both from individuals and foreign nations looking to buy influence.

But what do they do with it all? They can’t bathe in it, although I can, unfortunately, picture the two of them rolling around in the stuff, the way my dog will occasionally find a patch of lawn she finds irresistible.

The truth is that no matter what they do, no matter where they go, someone else is always around to pick up the tab. Heck, even though Bill has gone from looking like a blimp to looking like a cadaver, he doesn’t even have to pay for sex. Paying?! Often as not, if we can believe Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers. Christie Zercher, Juanita Broaddrick, Eilsteen Wellstone and Paula Jones — and why wouldn’t we? — the s.o.b. doesn’t even bother asking.

Because we keep seeing the outrageous behavior of coddled college students and their fascistic professors play out on TV, the sorry state of education is often on my mind.

But even if academia hadn’t morphed into a moral swampland during my lifetime, I would want to share Leo Buscaglia’s observation with you. He said: “It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time of learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.”

Neither he nor I would suggest that teaching the basics — English, math, history and civics, while downplaying self-esteem and diversity — wouldn’t be a giant step forward, but I have long argued that if you want to teach a child, you’d be wise to make the material pertinent to his interests.

For instance, when I was in grammar school, Miss Scane and Miss Gordon were still teaching math as if it were the 1850s, not the 1950s. They kept nattering on about the price of potatoes per acre or about two trains traveling in opposite directions, while I, a baseball fan, was teaching myself to compute batting statistics and earned run averages.

That was me, but I can assure you that all the boys I knew would have been more receptive to math if Miss Gordon had told them how to determine yards-per-carry or how the Washington Redskins quarterback, Sammy Baugh’s statistics compared to Sid Luckman’s or Bob Waterfield’s.

I will conclude by mentioning that one of my readers amused me by letting me know that right before he dies, he plans to swallow a bag of popcorn kernels in order to make his cremation ceremony a memorable event.