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

by Andy Borowitz

In 1984, he told the Washington Post that Ronald Reagan should let him take over arms negotiations with the Soviets: “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles… I think I know most of it anyway.” Reagan declined this generous offer, preferring the advice of an astrologist.

By his own account, Trump was an expert in an astounding number of fields. “I know more about courts than any human being on Earth,” he said in 2015; not wishing to be typecast as a judicial wonk, he added, six months later, “I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth.” It would be extraordinary, to say the least, for an expert in both courts and renewables to know a lot about the tax code, but, according to Trump, “I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.” As for technology, look out, Elon Musk: “Technology—nobody knows more about technology than me.” As for Senator Cory Booker, look out, Senator Cory Booker: “I know more about Cory than he knows about himself.” Of Trump’s many claims to expertise, though, one might well be true: “Nobody knows debt better than me.”

There is, however, one book reportedly in his possession, according to his ex-wife Ivana: he kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches, titled My New Order, at his bedside. His own oratory suggests that he might have dipped into that one from time to time.

Moving from math to science, Trump shares the skeptical views of his fellow climatologists Ron Johnson and Sharron Angle about something he called, on Twitter, “global waming.” Offering a novel theory, he claimed that climate change was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Instead of worrying about that hoax, however, he urged his followers to focus on a more pressing danger: killer lightbulbs. “Remember, new ‘environment friendly’ lightbulbs can cause cancer,” he tweeted in 2012. “Be careful—the idiots who came up with this stuff don’t care.” According to Trump, there’s nothing more lethal than lightbulbs—with the possible exception of wind farms.

“Not only are wind farms disgusting looking, but even worse they are bad for people’s health,” he tweeted, again in 2012. “The fumes coming up to make these massive windmills is more than anything that we’re talking about with natural gas,” he later claimed. I’d ask him to produce some numbers to back that up, but, as we’ve seen, when Trump wanders into the land of numbers, it never ends well. The news about wind turbines was no better in 2019, when Trump hinted darkly, “[T]hey say the noise causes cancer.” (Wait, that’s lightbulbs’ job!) You’d think giving us cancer would satisfy wind power’s appetite for destruction, but no. During the same 2020 presidential debate where Trump talked about the “fumes” associated with wind farms, he alleged that the turbines “kills [sic] all the birds.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service disagreed, stating that the number one threat to birds is cats.

Trump’s most surreal mash-up of historical periods, however, occurred during a Fourth of July speech in 2019, when he offered this time-bending narrative of the Revolutionary War: “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.” People were so distracted by the image of eighteenth-century airports—did they have Sbarro back then, too?—that most overlooked the fact that the battle of Fort McHenry occurred during the War of 1812.

He pronounced Namibia “Nambia” and called Thailand “Thighland,” as if it were a strip club.

He thought Nepal and Bhutan were parts of India, and called them “Nipple” and “Button.”

In a 2017 meeting with two Presbyterian pastors, he seemed confused about whether Presbyterians were Christians. Incidentally, he was raised Presbyterian.

Like J. Danforth Quayle and George W. Bush, Donald John Trump was born into a third generation of family wealth. His grandfather Friedrich Trump struck it rich during the Klondike Gold Rush not by mining gold but by “mining the miners,” in the words of Trump family historian Gwenda Blair. After thousands of would-be prospectors abandoned their worn-out steeds on a treacherous mountain pass aptly named Dead Horse Gulch, Friedrich saw his big chance to break into the restaurant industry. In a forerunner of Trump Steaks, he repurposed the horseflesh as tasty entrées for famished Gold Rushers, thus launching a portfolio of businesses that soon included a highly regarded Arctic brothel. Inheriting the commercial savvy that enabled Friedrich to sell quarter-pound horseberders, his son Fred created a thriving real estate business in New York, building thousands of apartments and refusing to rent them to Black applicants. “My father taught me everything I know,” Donald later said.

“It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy. And maybe he’ll get four or five percent of the vote and it’ll be a really staunch, right-wacko vote. I’m not even sure if it’s right. It’s just a wacko vote. And I just can’t imagine that anybody can take him seriously.”

The Apprentice presented everything he said as unequivocally insightful. Enthroned in his high-back chair, he was the Obi-Wan Kenobi of capitalism.

Under Reagan, facts were “stupid things”; under Bush, facts were the silly obsession of “the reality-based community.” Conway was taking the rebranding of facts into a whole new dimension. What did she mean, exactly, by “alternative facts”? Maybe an alternative fact was like an alternative band: something not many people had heard of, but really cool if you knew about it?

Because the Age of Ignorance has repeatedly enacted a dark principle: in the absence of knowledge, violence fills the void.

Stevens points out what few Republicans have acknowledged: the views that people find abhorrent in Trump make him not the antithesis of Reagan but his rightful successor.

Reagan and Trump availed themselves of the same deep bench of sociopathic henchmen, from the corrupt Roy Cohn to the predatory Roger Ailes to the felonious Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. As for Reagan’s “civility and personal grace,” as Peter Wehner put it, which Reagan, exactly, was he describing? The one who used racist dog whistles like “states’ rights” and “welfare queen”? The one who said, of student protesters, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with”? The one who wished that California’s hungry would contract botulism? The one who permitted his press secretary to turn AIDS into a joke? The one who called African leaders cannibals and monkeys? The Party of Reagan seems pretty recognizable to me.

History doesn’t move in a straight line, and the improbable trajectory of Dan Quayle seems to prove that point. After a spell as a national punch line, the hapless veep was consigned to decades of obscurity, only to reemerge, in 2021, as the Republican Party’s voice of reason. Quayle’s role in saving our democracy might not merit his inclusion on Mount Rushmore, but it’s certainly worthy of an exhibit at his vice presidential museum, as well as a question on the museum’s Quayle Quiz. At a moment when Mike Pence seemed to be losing his mind, Dan Quayle was there to remind him what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.

In their book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson reported that many Tea Partiers were better educated than the average American, and extremely well-versed in the workings of government. Ironically, though, because their heightened engagement in politics made them avid consumers of Fox News and other right-wing propaganda, they were also extremely well-versed in batshit-crazy fever dreams that overrode their rational faculties.

Liberals and conservatives alike get some of their nuttiest ideas from social media. If we’re looking to reverse the ravages of the Age of Ignorance, a good first step might be to stop spending so much of our time on these platforms. 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.

The GOP was all for exporting democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, but it turns out they don’t like it much here at home.