Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

Despite his reputation as a deficit hawk, he added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined: it soared from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion on his watch.

His most famous gaffe occurred during an address to the United Negro College Fund, when, just as Bush struggled to retrieve the correct cliché about a half-empty glass, Quayle tried to pry loose from his tangled synapses the organization’s famous slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”: “You take the United Negro College Fund model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

Bush’s Yale transcript was a monument to mediocrity. But, before you turn this data point into a decision point, remember: a college transcript is an unreliable predicter of presidential performance. Though an average student, Bush went on to become one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.

As successful as Obama’s simplified messaging was, some supporters felt he was insulting his audience’s intelligence. In an interview with Playboy in 2013, the actor Samuel L. Jackson, who’d backed Obama in both his presidential bids, accused him of “promoting mediocrity” by sounding less educated than he was. “[S]top trying to ‘relate,’ ” Jackson said. “Be a leader. Be fucking presidential. Look, I grew up in a society where I could say ‘It ain’t’ or ‘What it be’ to my friends. But when I’m out presenting myself to the world as me, who graduated from college, who had family who cared about me, who has a well-read background, I fucking conjugate.”

It was striking that a candidate who had spent her career in the company of men pretend-fighting in capes, masks, and tights feared that an association with Palin might undermine her seriousness.

The Heritage Foundation wound up ousting DeMint in 2017, apparently deciding that a think tank should be run by someone more experienced at thinking.

For anyone interested in a book that translates The Art of the Deal into reality, in 2020 Barbara Res, a construction supervisor who rose to the rank of executive vice president of the Trump Organization, published Tower of Lies: What My Eighteen Years of Working with Donald Trump Reveals About Him. Res describes “his lack of concentration, his penchant for diverting big decisions to other people, his collecting of ass-kissers, his mood swings, his ignorance—even in areas of his ‘genius,’ like construction and finance and real estate.” She defines “the Trump way” as “a mix of the nefarious and the ignorant.” As for his skills as a self-styled master builder, Res states, “Trump didn’t know much about construction (he once said only a masochist could enjoy it) and even less about renovation.”

Trump’s ideology wasn’t just toxic—it was derivative.

The logic of Quayle’s answer was Palinesque: If Americans were looking for someone less qualified than Clinton, Trump was more qualified at being unqualified.

In the Age of Ignorance, I’ll take reassurance wherever I can get it.

During the Trump years, some members of the “Resistance” thought they were accomplishing something by arguing with their opposite numbers on Facebook and Twitter. Actually, the minute you get into an argument online, the other side automatically wins, because you’re expending energy that could have been applied to political activities that are productive and not just symbolic.