This is an opinion column.

It’s a grade-school lesson many of us learned long ago, an oft-repeated colloquialism that’s circulated for decades: Don’t assume. Why? Because it makes us all look like the smelly end of a donkey.

TV fans of a certain golden age may recall the 1973 episode of The Odd Couple when Felix Unger, defending himself and roommate Oscar Madison against a ticket-scalping charge, interrupted a witness who said, “Well, I assumed…”

“Did you say you assumed?” Unger asked.

“Well, yes,” the young woman replied.

“Miss Olem,” Unger said with an index finger pointing skyward, “you should never assume…”

He then strolled to a backboard in the courtroom and scrawled in chalk “ASSUME” in big bold letters.

“…because when you assume…”

He emphatically circled the first three letters, then the “u,” then “me.”

“…you make an ass out of you and me.” Unger then dropped the chalk.

[Watch the scene here.]

The courtroom and studio audience exploded with applause and laughter.

“That’s very good,” the judge said.

It’s still good.

Don’t ass-u-me. Don’t express a “fact” without evidence of its truth. Don’t say what you may believe to the depths of your soul without a swatch of credible, validating backup.

Don’t verbalize without validating.

Don’t ass-u-me.

The website quoteinvestigator.com traced the saying as far back as a 1958 edition of Women’s Wear Daily with an article quoting a store manager as using the colorful adage for training.

It’s still sound advice — as our next president recently proved.

Still a few weeks before reinhabiting the Oval Office, Trump is already doing his level best to be the smelly end of a donkey. Doing it again, I should say, levying ludicrous assumptions to portray a “great” America that was only great for silver-spoon-fed folks like him.

He did it this time in reaction to yet another horrific act of domestic terrorism — the killing of 14 people and the injuring of at least 35 more on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the early hours of the new year by a man authorities quickly identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar.

Jabbar barreled his pickup truck, adorned with an Islamic State flag, around a temporary blockade, slammed into stunned revelers, then fired shots into the crowd before being shot dead by police. Two Alabamians, Auburn graduate Drew Dauphin and University of Alabama freshman Kareem Badawi, are among the dead. And the injured include some among a group from Mobile visiting New Orleans.

As the fog of fear gave way to a daytime nightmare on a street many of us have visited and enjoyed, the president-elect launched a familiar political attack on immigrants on his own so-misnamed Truth Social platform based on an assumption that was quickly proven blatantly false.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote.

Except Jabbar didn’t come in from anywhere, as Trump ass-u-me’d. He’s a 42-year-old born-and-bred native of Beaumont, Texas, an Army vet who was discharged honorably 10 years ago, according to the FBI.

He was a U.S. citizen. He was ours.

Moreover, by what barometer are their criminals (again, ass-u-me-ing our neighbors are shipping their criminals to us) “far worse” than ours? Far worse than the plethora of U.S. citizens who kill our own — especially our children?

In that post, Trump also wrote: “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

No assumption there, just a lie. As we and others have widely reported, overall crime is down significantly since the hellish days of the pandemic, and homicides are down in most major cities (Birmingham being a tragic exception.)

Of course, Trump’s even bigger assumption is that you’ll believe him. That’s on you.

I just want us to be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.