English Translation
The former president of the United States is the only American who knows the president of every country.
Any idea who this refers to?
Realistically, nobody. There are hundreds of countries, and not all of them have presidents in any case. Of those that do, the nature of the position (and therefore the relevance to foreign relations) varies widely. Some presidents are executives (USA, France, Russia), some have only ceremonial and/or constitutional roles (Italia, Germany, India), which makes the knowledge of who they are more trivia than relevant information. Also barely a week goes by when some country, somewhere, doesn’t have a change of government, especially in less well known locations, and doubly so with unstable governments. It would take a “Rain Man” style savant to know all of them at any one point in time, much less keep up with the changes.
I think this question is just an example of what I do with some sentences when I create custom collections; use the same word in slightly different contexts to help memorise different usages in one go, such as:
- Le précédent président des États-Unis;
- le président de tous les pays.
I can’t speak for the sentence’s creator but I strongly suspect that’s it.