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

by Andy Borowitz

As his former speechwriter David Frum wrote, “Conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House.”

leadership in the state capital picked up on the cocksure mien as well. And a Texas reporter was startled to hear the newly elected governor tell him, ‘Blacks didn’t come out for me like the Hispanics did. So they’re not gonna see much help from me.’ ” At a news conference about a heat wave that had already resulted in eighty deaths and rampaging forest fires, Bush gave a sneak preview of his devil-may-care response to Hurricane Katrina. Dubya called a Forestry Service official to the podium by yelling, “Tree Man, get up here!” As the official spoke, Bush stuck out his tongue and puffed out his cheeks, imitating a blowfish.

announced his candidacy for president, on June 13, 1999, Bush’s Brain faced a far more unnerving task: how to conceal his candidate’s near-total obliviousness about countries other than the United States of America.

when he was warned repeatedly that major terror attacks were both likely and imminent. On April 20, 2001, CIA analysts prepared a report for him titled “Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations.” Having failed

to rouse Bush with that one, they issued reports with increasingly grabby headlines—“Bin Laden Attacks May Be Imminent,” “Bin Laden Planning High Profile Attacks”—as if bouncing horror movie titles off a hard-to-scare focus group. Eventually, they resorted to a President’s Daily Brief with a screaming headline dominated by one-syllable words: “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real.” After the CIA’s intelligence analyst Michael Morell delivered this PDB to Bush on Air Force One, W. dismissively responded, “OK, Michael. You’ve covered your ass.”

He received that report, a PDB infamously titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” on August 6. The document was not just urgent, it was specific, noting “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” Bush went fishing.

The absence of any credible intelligence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction didn’t trouble Bush’s incurious mind as he marched toward war. It was hard to argue facts with someone who, like the Blues Brothers, believed he was on a mission from God. In 2002, the journalist Ron Suskind got an earful from a White House aide who confirmed that Bush was now operating untethered from knowledge: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and

I don’t want a president who’s just like me. I’m pretty sure I’d suck at the job. I want a president to be better than I am: smarter, braver, calmer, and more patient. When a country faces war, economic collapse, or contagion, I’m not sure it’s Miller Time. Lincoln may have been our greatest president, but he wouldn’t be in my top hundred potential drinking buddies. He could get kind of dark.

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.” When the star of Snakes on a Plane accuses you of dumbing things down, attention must be paid.

Much has been made of John McCain’s reckless selection, during his 2008 presidential run, of the woefully unqualified Sarah Palin as his running mate. In reality, Palin wasn’t a wild aberration from the national Republican candidates who preceded her but, rather, a logical result of the trend they embodied. The inanities she spewed were no more absurd than those of George W. Bush, whose warm embrace of his own ignorance softened the ground for her. Palin had much in common with Bush, who had much

in common with Quayle. Therefore, according to the transitive property of stupidity, Palin also had a great deal in common with Quayle.

With her toxic brew of ignorance and grievance, Sarah Palin was the gateway ignoramus who led to Donald Trump.

Answering a question about the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, Palin opined, “If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.” We’ll never know whether it was good enough for the Founding Fathers because the Pledge of Allegiance wasn’t written until 1892; the reference to God was inserted in 1954.

when someone calls you “a quick study,” you don’t know shit.

“Does any of this really matter?” To millions of his supporters, the answer is no. To them, Trump is successful, smart, and well-informed.

“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump’s followers apply a similar rule to his behavior: When Trump does it, that means that it is not idiotic. Regardless of what he says or does, Trump is right, and the media, always doing a “hit job” on him, are wrong.

Donald Trump does indeed have an island of competence, and it has taken him far: a preternatural talent for drawing attention to himself. He captivates by bragging, bullying, and, like Ronald Reagan, telling stories of questionable veracity. His genius for attention-grabbing has proven adaptable, serving him in his multifarious career as a New York tabloid star, TV juggernaut, and internet troll. But,

As a child, Donald Trump displayed both an all-consuming need for attention and an impressive knack for getting it. If you invited him to a birthday party, he’d show his gratitude by throwing cake. At Kew-Forest, the elementary school he attended in Queens, the faculty members he hurled erasers at were the lucky ones; he punched one second-grade teacher in the eye. “I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music,” he recounts in The Art of the Deal. “Even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way.” Not surprisingly, his father decided to dispatch this irrepressible rapscallion to military school. At the New York Military Academy, Donald continued to study the art of bullying. He tormented one of the most diminutive students there, his four-foot-eleven, 120-pound roommate; he even tried to push the cadet out a second-story window. Reflecting on his youthful antics, Trump observed, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

As Schwartz tried to gather material by interviewing his subject, Trump’s microscopic attention span astounded him. Trump, Schwartz later recalled, was “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Jane Mayer reported in her 2016 profile of Schwartz that the ghostwriter “regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. ‘If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.’ ” As for the flattering portrayal of Trump in The Art of the Deal, Schwartz said, “I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.” After spending a day watching Trump in action, the writer would tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!” According to Mayer, “Schwartz’s aim in ‘The Art of the Deal’ was to present Trump as the hero of every chapter, but, after looking into some of his supposedly brilliant deals, Schwartz concluded that there were cases in which there was no way to make Trump look good. So he sidestepped unflattering incidents and details. ‘I didn’t consider it my job to investigate,’ he says.”

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

terrorists with a binary opposition of his own: us versus immigrants. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said, sounding like the lead singer in a Pat Buchanan tribute band. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

in the absence of knowledge, violence fills the void.

On May 8, Mayor John Lindsay ordered the flag at city hall flown at half-staff to commemorate the four students murdered by National Guardsmen during the antiwar protest four days earlier at Kent State University. As young protesters gathered nearby, a mob of angry white construction workers attacked them in a melee that became known as the Hardhat Riot. Not content with their beatdown of the hippies, the rioters launched an assault on city hall. Just as insurrectionists would someday seek to hang Mike Pence, the Hardhat Rioters hunted a quarry of their own: Mayor Lindsay.

In his riveting book, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, David Paul Kuhn re-creates the scene: “As the mass coalesced, men’s eyes were trained on City Hall. Shouting persisted: ‘Where’s Lindsay?… Lindsay’s a rat!… We want Lindsay! We want Lindsay!’ ” The deputy borough president, Leonard Cohen, “saw a ‘large mass of men,’ about five to six hundred, with yellow hard hats and American flags, pushing against the front of City Hall, ‘shouting slogans and chanting angrily.’ The men drove forward and reached the foot of the steps. Suddenly, they surged up the stairs ‘as if to storm City Hall itself’… Scores of hardhats hopped City Hall’s fence, leapt over the hoods of boxy police cars, and toppled iron barricades. Several hardhats ran with flags pointed forward, like soldiers brandishing their colors.” A rioter reached the roof of City Hall, where he restored the flag to full staff, to the raucous cheers of his brethren below. By day’s end, dozens had been injured.

There was little doubt whether Nixon and Buchanan condoned this kind of violence; to show his appreciation for the attack, the president invited leaders of the rioters’ unions to the White House for a celebratory photo op. Nixon claimed that he was honoring “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism.” In return, the labor chieftains gave him an honorary hard hat. As Nixon later reminisced, the hardhats “were with us when some of the elitist crowd were running away from us. Thank God for the hardhats!”

Another riot, on November 22, 2000, was orchestrated in part by a Republican operative with ties to both Nixon and Trump: Roger Stone. The

effort to tip Florida’s contested presidential vote in George W. Bush’s favor.

mob of demonstrators, organized by Republicans and dressed in suit jackets and ties, poured into the building to disrupt the process.

When the ruckus was over, the protesters had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting.” The attack, which became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot, helped secure the presidency for Bush.

around there is not telling the truth. I saw it with my own eyes. Violence, fear and physical intimidation affected the outcome of a lawful elections process.”

In light of Trump and the GOP’s long-standing love affair with mob violence, the insurrection at the Capitol seems less like an outlier and more like a sequel. But its predictability makes it no less horrifying. When the history of American infamy is written, Trump might actually read it. So many paragraphs will feature his name.

You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party… Today, in the age of Donald Trump, the most openly racist president since Andrew Johnson or his hero Andrew Jackson (to the extent a know-nothing narcissist is capable of having a hero), many Republicans who find Trump repulsive or at least consider him abrasive and uncouth hark back to Reagan as the standard compared with whom Trump is woefully inadequate… But in the area of race, there is a direct line from the more genteel prejudice of Ronald Reagan to the white nationalism of Donald Trump.

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.

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.

Obsessively watching cable news, checking Twitter, and monitoring the latest polls—all of which I’ve been guilty of—makes us feel like we’re staying informed, but to what end? When I do these things, I’m just a passive observer, rooting for my team.

though it’s helpful to know how ignorant our politicians have become over the past fifty years, that knowledge is only valuable if we take action to oust our current crop of dunces. That’s not going to be easy. But, in the words of an activist Hersh

quotes who was rattled by the 2016 election, “I really started feeling that if we are going to save our democracy, we all really need to work, to do hard things.”

Listening is a crucial ingredient of a relatively new campaign technique Hersh advocates called deep canvassing.

Despite unprecedented attacks on our embattled democracy, the brakes worked. The braking system of democracy is in ragged condition right now, but it’s still there. The brakes work every time we register to vote and help others do the same. The brakes work when we provide transportation for someone who otherwise wouldn’t make it to the polls. The brakes work when we see a long line of people waiting to vote and offer them water. The brakes work when we go to town meetings, make our voices heard, and listen to the voices of others. The brakes work when we organize, fundraise, and canvass. The brakes work when we march, protest, and vote. The brakes work when, against the odds, we change one voter’s mind. We’re the brakes.