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

by Andy Borowitz

After Harding’s inaugural address in 1921, H. L. Mencken wrote, “No other such complete and dreadful nitwit is to be found in the pages of American history.” Mencken should’ve added, “… so far.”

Although Harding has the dubious distinction of being smarter than Trump—pretty much the dictionary definition of faint praise—both belong to a tradition that we Americans shouldn’t be proud of: our habit of installing dim bulbs in the White House. There’s a long history of anti-intellectualism in American life,

It wasn’t a good sign when the eloquent abolitionist John Quincy Adams lost the 1828 presidential election to the homicidal maniac Andrew Jackson. (“Old Hickory,” who was neither stable nor a genius, challenged more than a hundred men to duels. He killed only one, but still.) Over the next thirty years, the nation endured a presidential clown parade.

Know-Nothings. Fillmore and his running mate, Andrew Jackson Donelson (the homicidal maniac’s nephew), believed that there was nothing wrong with America that persecuting all its German, Irish, and Catholic immigrants couldn’t fix. As dumb as Fillmore sounds, the winner on Election Day might have been even dumber: James “Old Buck” Buchanan. Though Buchanan failed to avert the Civil War, he sprang into action to defuse a military confrontation with the British over the shooting of a solitary pig in Canada. (This skirmish actually happened; google “Pig War.”) The following year, the American people seemed to say, “Enough of this bullshit,” and elected Abraham Lincoln.

My preference that politicians be educated probably brands me as an elitist. I’m fine with that. I consider myself the Ted Nugent of elitism. But being an elitist doesn’t make me a snob—hear me out, there’s a difference. When I say “educated,” I want politicians to have the knowledge required to do their jobs well, or at least not to get us all killed.

Harry Truman wasn’t a college graduate, and he probably took some solace in knowing that a predecessor of his, George Washington, wasn’t, either. It’s possible to become a great president with no more than twelve months of grade school—an educational background that Abraham Lincoln, being honest and all, would have had to disclose on LinkedIn.

What made Roosevelt a successful president, among other gifts, was his intellectual curiosity, which enabled him to absorb vast amounts of information necessary to resolve unprecedented crises.

I want the president of the United States to be intellectually curious for a simple reason: I think the person running the country should be smarter than I am. We’ve just lived through the alternative, and it was only good for the liquor industry.

Ronald Reagan, whose gift as a TV performer helped hide his cluelessness, and Dan Quayle, who shared Reagan’s cluelessness but not his knack for hiding it.

During the Acceptance stage, ignorance mutated into something more agreeable: a sign that a politician was authentic, down-to-earth, and a “normal person.” Consequently, dumb politicians felt free to appear dumb.

preferable to knowledge, dunces are exalted over experts, and a candidate can win a seat in Congress after blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers. Being ill-informed is now a litmus test; consequently, smart politicians must pretend to be dumb. I’ll profile the ultimate embodiment of this stage, Donald J. Trump, and Trump wannabes such as Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis—who, despite being graduates of our nation’s finest universities, strenuously try to outdumb him.

Reagan was more responsible for the rise of ignorance than for the fall of communism.

Christopher Hitchens wrote, “The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump.”

Gary Schuster, of the Detroit News, said, “I know Reagan likes to read the funnies.”

here he is in 1979, revealing that the greatest environmental hazard isn’t man-made at all: “Eighty percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.” When he reprised his theory about these toxic emissions during the 1980 campaign, students at California’s Claremont College affixed this sign to a tree: “Chop Me Down Before I Kill Again.”

Cannon recalled an early press conference where a reporter asked Reagan about his legislative program: “The novice governor did not have a clue. Turning plaintively to aides who were attending the news conference, he said, ‘I could take some coaching from the sidelines if anyone can recall my legislative program.’ Aides piped up and told Reagan some of the items in ‘his’ program.”

With Reagan set to debate Carter on October 28 at Cleveland’s Music Hall, Spencer was determined to prevent a repeat of Ford’s flameout. Seeking an advantage over the sitting president, the Reagan campaign did something that Manuel Noriega surely would have endorsed: it illicitly obtained Carter’s debate briefing book.

The most famous moment in the face-off came after Carter accused him of opposing Medicare. As Carter attacked, the camera caught Reagan smiling beatifically, perhaps remembering his opponent’s words, verbatim, from the pilfered briefing materials. After waiting for Carter to finish, he responded with his now immortal comeback: “There you go again.”

From the moment he cocked his head and said those four words, you could stick a fork in Carter.

When you watch the debate today, what’s striking is that everything Carter said right before Reagan’s legendary burn was a hundred percent true. And yet, as Reagan had predicted, the facts were forgettable.

All anyone remembered from the night were four sarcastic words that made Carter look like a grumpy crank. Unlike Ford, who tripped over facts, Reagan avoide...

Reagan demonstrated that, in the hands of a talented TV performer, one joke could sink a thousand facts.

Reagan claimed in a radio address that South Africa was a bastion of racial equality: “[T]hey have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertaining and so forth were segregated. That has all been eliminated.”

would have been welcome news to Nelson Mandela, had it reached his prison cell. Turning to a country he presumably knew more about because he despised it so much, Reagan said, “I’m no linguist but I have been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” Reagan was half right: he was no linguist. The Russian word for freedom is svoboda.

Reagan’s mythologizers have worked hard to bury this image of him as an object of ridicule,

Given the press’s reluctance to fact-check Reagan, it’s no surprise that the public gradually stopped caring whether anything he said was, well, factual.

As much as Reagan celebrated his own laziness, that moral generosity did not extend to one of his favorite political straw men: the poor, with special emphasis on welfare recipients.

Another favorite target was the mythical unemployed person who avoided work despite being showered with job opportunities.

Reagan reserved his most scathing commentary about the laziness of others for a woman he made famous as the “welfare queen.”

Reagan never explicitly said that the welfare queen was Black, but he didn’t have to. By referring to a welfare cheat in Chicago, a city with a large African American population, he was sending a message his white audience would have no trouble decoding.

(Never mind that the vast majority of welfare recipients were, and still are, white.)

her to see “all these beautiful white people.” Those who argue that the economic hardship suffered by people of color under Reagan’s presidency was just a nutty coincidence rather than the inevitable result of racist policies should turn their attention to a 1971 phone conversation between him and then president Richard Nixon, who, always so helpful to historians, taped just about everything.

In his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Reagan wrote, “Whatever the reasons for the myth that I’m a racist, I blow my top every time I hear it.” Let us count the reasons. His “monkeys” remark is of a piece with his disparagement of allegedly polygamous Kenyans, his full-throated praise of South Africa’s apartheid regime, and his 1965 comment about recently independent African nations: “When they have a man for lunch, they really have him for lunch.” Reagan also had a knack for surrounding himself with bigots. There was his secretary of the interior, James Watt, of “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple” fame. And there was Marianne Mele Hall, whom Reagan appointed in 1985 as the chair of the Copyright Royalty Tribunal. It emerged that she had

Five months later, when he became president, his cabinet was as white as his reelection commercial would be, with only one Black person in a peripheral role:

In Reaganland, the homeless didn’t want homes, the unemployed didn’t want jobs, and, in possibly his nerviest claim, the hungry didn’t want food. “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night,” Reagan said in 1964. “Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” Later, when his image as governor was tarnished by a huge crowd of poor people jostling for free food at a distribution site, he suggested this novel solution to the hunger problem: “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”IX

When Reagan took his final bow in the White House, though, none of his failures mattered to Republicans, who gave him an approval rating in the eighties. Reagan’s performing talent had mitigated the scorn that greeted him when he entered politics, but that achievement was deceptive: the Ridicule stage was still in effect, ready to devour an unsuspecting victim. Eight years after the Gipper won the presidency, our perverse American experiment was about to pose a new question: What if a candidate had all of Reagan’s ignorance but none of his talent?

Bush was unpopular with women, while Quayle, in Bush’s infinite wisdom, was catnip for the ladies.

Remarkably, Quayle shared the delusion that he and the Sundance Kid were separated at birth. “Danny thinks he has more nearly perfect features than Robert Redford,” said a law school friend, Frank Pope.XIV

Even when his handlers tried to make a speech goof-proof, Bush managed to snatch incoherence from the jaws of clarity. During his reelection campaign, when polls suggested, with some justification, that he lacked empathy, his speechwriters fed the stage direction (message: I care) into the teleprompter to remind him to read the next line with something approximating human emotion. Instead, he read the stage direction aloud, robotically emitting the non sequitur MESSAGE I CARE to a confused audience.

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.”

Though Quayle correctly deduced that the eastern part of Pennsylvania was more east than the western part, his grasp of geography elsewhere was less secure. “We have a firm commitment to Europe,” he said. “We are a part of Europe.” And: “I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix.” And, sublimely: “It’s wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.”

His most glorious gaffes were mind-bending adventures that challenged the linear nature of time: “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”; “The future will be better tomorrow”; “The real question for 1988 is whether we’re going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the… to the back”; and “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.”

One TV anchor who interviewed Quayle at the convention had a reaction similar to that of his professor at DePauw: “When I looked into his eyes I could see to the back of his head.”

On the campaign trail, Stu Spencer worked overtime to keep Quayle from revealing his glaring cluelessness. That meant putting him in front of friendly audiences—“friendly” being a delicate way of saying “white.” “Dan Quayle doesn’t know about cities,” Spencer told the Los Angeles Times. “He doesn’t know who lives there, ghettos, traffic, race, crime, housing, all of that stuff, but we’ll teach him.”

Despite his best efforts, Spencer couldn’t stop his pupil from asserting that Republicans “understand the importance of bondage between parent and child,”

The New York Times published this harrowing account of his attempt, after a speech in Phoenix, to answer an audience member’s question about the White House’s proposal for medical malpractice reform: Mr. Quayle, an earnest look on his face, began to fidget. “I, I can’t tell you exactly what we do on that pain and suffering in the—” the Vice President said, his voice trailing off as he looked offstage

toward Kevin E. Moley, the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, who has been coaching him. “Kevin, what do we do on the pain and suffering on our malpractice proposal?”

spelled “potato” on the chalkboard, Quayle advised him, “Add a little bit to the end there… [Y]ou’re right phonetically, but…” Once he’d hectored young William into disfiguring his answer by adding an e,

When Quayle didn’t know something, we knew he didn’t know. He freaked out, he panicked, he got snippy. He kept riffing, nonsensically, believing he was circling the facts when he was only circling the drain.

Bush mocked knowledge as an affectation of the elites and made ignorance proof of his authenticity. His swaggering pride in how little he knew—and he knew very, very little—made George W. Bush the father of the second stage of ignorance: Acceptance.