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

by Andy Borowitz

Being dumb’s just about the worst thing there is when it comes to holding high office. —HARRY S. TRUMAN The worst thing a man can do is go bald. —DONALD J. TRUMP

Imagine a hypothetical job applicant. He can’t spell the simplest words, such as “heal” and “tap.” Confused by geography, he thinks there’s an African country called “Nambia.” As for American history, he’s under the impression that Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845, was angry about the Civil War, and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive.

When you review some of Harding’s presidential initiatives, comparisons to Trump seem even less apt. Harding supported a federal anti-lynching law and proposed a commission to investigate not only lynching but the disenfranchisement of Black voters. On October 26, 1921, he advocated racial equality in a major civil rights speech in Birmingham, Alabama. “Whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for that equality,” he declared. For a guy Mencken called a nitwit, he was far more enlightened than the person who, in

the aftermath of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, said that there were “very fine people on both sides.” (It’s also possible that Mencken didn’t think one’s support for racial equality was desirable, since his posthumously published diary revealed him to be racist, anti-Semitic, and pro-Nazi. In other words, a very fine person.)

What happens when you combine ignorance with performing talent? A president who tells the country to inject bleach.

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.

The website of the FDR Foundation points out that, when adjusted for grade inflation, his marks would translate to “high B’s by today’s standards.” This assessment of FDR’s transcript would have more credibility coming from an organization that didn’t have FDR in its name.

understand why Reaganites would want to cast him as the leading man in the story of communism’s disintegration, but I’d argue that he deserves as much credit for the demise of disco—that is, not very much, even though it gurgled its death rattle on his watch.

Explaining why he wrote the book, Byrne says that he became frustrated by the widespread recognition Barack Obama received for his intellect, while Reagan’s big brain remained ignored. This slight was particularly galling, he argues, because Reagan was a far more original thinker than Obama. That’s true, in the way Dr. Oz is a far more original thinker than Dr. Stephen Hawking.

“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.”

In 1958, Welch, a former executive at the candy company responsible for Junior Mints, founded the John Birch Society, a conspiracy-theory factory and the QAnon of its day. (His cofounder was Fred C. Koch, who, having also sired the Koch brothers, has a lot to answer for.) The Birchers were a community of crackpots who believed, among other wigged-out fantasies, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. One commie plot keeping Welch up at night was a demonic scheme to drug the entire U.S. population by fluoridating the water supply.III Though he was known mainly for finding a Bolshevik under every rock, the right-wing Willy Wonka shared other febrile anxieties in his manifesto The Blue Book of the John Birch Society. One of his more inventive theories was that the United States was being devoured from within not only by communism and fluoride but by the steamy, youth-corrupting novel Peyton Place. By finding the fake Lenin quote in Welch’s loony book, Reagan demonstrated that his voracious reading encompassed

not only nineteenth-century French economists but also twentieth-century American whack jobs.

In 1982, the New York Times deconstructed one of his favorite anecdotes designed to demonize those on public assistance, in which a man used food stamps to buy an orange

and the change to buy a bottle of vodka. As the Times pointed out, “Change for food stamps is given in other food stamps. Only if the change is for less than a dollar does one get back coins, and that is not enough, in any case, to buy vodka.” As moral instruction, the Fable of the Orange and the Vodka wouldn’t have made the cut with Aesop.

The victorious Gipper offered Californians a vision of their state that was as lyrical as it was incoherent: “A wind is blowing across this state of ours. And it is not only wind; it will grow into a tidal wave. And there will be a government with men as tall as mountains.” He didn’t explain how he planned to retrofit government buildings to accommodate such gigantic civil servants.

Eight years later, another egghead set Democratic hearts aflame and left the rest of the country cold: former college professor Eugene McCarthy, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota. Gene had next-level egghead cred: in addition to delivering fancy speeches, he wrote poetry. (Sample lines from his poem “The Camera”: “My eye is everywhere / I am Tom, peeping.”) In 1968, McCarthy rocked President Lyndon Johnson’s reelection campaign with a strong showing in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary.

When, in 1988, Reagan misquoted John Adams’s aphorism “Facts are stubborn things” as “Facts are stupid things,” it sounded as if he’d stumbled on the perfect title for his memoirs.

He redeployed the Rose Garden strategy, claiming that Bush would be too busy governatin’ to make himself available for public viewings. Theoretically, the two hard half days that Bush put in at the office each week would have left ample time for voters to kick his tires, but Rove would have none of it. On the rare occasions when he did let Bubble Boy out, it became clear that the candidate was a work in progress. When asked on Meet the Press if he had a take on Vladimir Putin, he replied, “I really don’t. I will if I’m the president.” (His eventual take—that he had looked Putin in the eye and got “a sense of his soul”—turned out to be worse than no take.) One week after he announced his candidacy, he confused Slovakia with Slovenia. “Nobody needs to tell me what I believe,” he told Talk magazine. “But I do need someone to tell me where Kosovo is.” He also, it seemed, needed someone to tell him what to call the people who lived there: he called Kosovars “Kosovarians,” much as he called East Timorese “East Timorians,” and Greeks “Grecians.” Attempting a quick injection of gravitas, Rove slated Bush to give a major foreign policy address at the Reagan Library. Thus a man who’d confused Slovakia and Slovenia sought to boost his geopolitical cred by speaking at the shrine to a man who’d confused Brazil and Bolivia.

In case any members of the Christian right missed Bush’s messianic point, he kept repeating it. “Freedom isn’t America’s gift to the world,” he’d say. “It is God’s gift to mankind.” As simple as this statement sounds, the theology behind it is murky. By “freedom,” Bush meant the “democratic” governments that the U.S. was attempting to install by force in Afghanistan and Iraq, regardless of whether those countries desired them. Did God want everyone in the world to have democracy? That word appears nowhere in the Bible, possibly because, as many of us learned in grade school, democracy is a Greek concept. Which God was Bush talking about—Zeus?

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.

America… He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it… [H]e tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” That’s right: the critically acclaimed author and former president of the Harvard Law Review was taking inspiration from a man who didn’t know that South America contained different countries. It was a testament to the viselike grip of the Age of Ignorance that another of our most informed politicians was paying tribute to one of our least.

Another Tea Party candidate with intriguing scientific views was Ron Johnson, a failed class-ring salesman who was running for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on August 16, 2010, Johnson, who had previously called claims that climate change was

man-made “lunacy” and their adherents “crazy,” advanced his own unique theory about the phenomenon. First, he offered some historical perspective, asserting that the Earth was pretty warm during the Middle Ages, when “it’s not like there were tons of cars on the road”; for that reason, he declared, “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change. It’s not proven by any stretch of the imagination.” Then, demonstrating a stretch of imagination all his own, he offered, “It’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time.” Like Rand Paul, Johnson has now been in the Senate for more than ten years, which to many people seem like the geologic eons of time.XII

As the 2012 presidential election cycle neared, speculation abounded that Palin might, after four years of Barack Obama, offer the nation a Return to Abnormalcy. Perhaps to signal that she was a new-and-improved Sarah Palin, vastly better informed than the one Katie Couric had eviscerated, she used

a 2011 visit to a Revolutionary War site in Boston to retell the story of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride: “He warned the British that they weren’t going be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells, and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.” Millions of schoolchildren who had learned that Revere’s mission was to warn the colonists that the British were, in fact, coming, were saddened to learn that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had lied to them. Revere’s actual mission, per Palin, was to warn the British to keep their hands off the colonists’ guns, which made him an eighteenth-century antecedent of NRA activists like Charlton Heston. Another detail of Palin’s account—the part about Revere “ringing those bells”—was of unknown origin.

Bachmann’s persistent confusion about names, dates, and places sometimes made you wonder if she’d accidentally downloaded a malicious version of Google. If elected president, she vowed, the U.S. would not have an embassy in Iran—not hard to accomplish, since it hadn’t had one since Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Speaking of Carter, she invoked his name while linking Obama to the 2009 swine flu epidemic: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama; I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” It would have been an interesting coincidence, except that the epidemic she was referring to happened under a Republican, Gerald Ford. She warned of “the rise of the Soviet Union” in 2011, two decades after it fell. Blasting Obama once more, she said that he “put us in Libya. He is now putting us in Africa,” seemingly unaware that, by putting us in Libya, he had already put us in Africa.

While Santorum never accused Obama of palling around with terrorists, he did level an equally serious charge against the sitting president: that he was plotting to send more Americans to college. “Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college,” he warned a Michigan audience. “He wants to remake you in his image.” (Obama wants you to be educated like him—what a dick!) Santorum had already introduced this anti-getting-smarter theme four years earlier, when he said, “If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?… The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first—first successful was in academia.” Considering that colleges were such a cauldron of evil, it’s astonishing that his Tea Party colleague Sarah Palin attended so many of them.

Thanks to Trump’s strategic deployment of CAPS LOCK, military intervention proved unnecessary. One day after the midterms, the dreaded caravan suddenly vanished. Trump and his media partners at Fox News stopped talking about it. Did this unexplained evaporation of thousands of the worst evildoers on the planet trouble his supporters? Not a bit. His strategy of flooding the zone with shit only inspired his disciples in Congress to try to outflood him.

Among the non-Bircher theories she advanced was that California wildfires were caused by lasers, fired from outer space, at the behest of the Jewish banking family the Rothschilds. Her claims had the unintended consequence of stoking the pride of many Jews, including me, who up to that point had felt that our control of the cosmos fell far short of our renowned hammerlock on the media and show business.

If there is one person besides God who’s capable of changing climate in this country, it might be Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas. When a deputy chief of the Forest Service testified before Congress, Gohmert inquired, “[I]s there anything that the National Forest Service or [Bureau of Land Management] can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate.”

Obviously! Gohmert should be commended for his creative thinking, but, as any informed citizen can tell you, the only people who can change the orbits of the Earth and the moon are the Rothschilds.

“Every time you have that soil or rock, whatever it is, that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise because now you’ve got less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up,” said Brooks, who, with his election to Congress in 2010, became a prime example of the bottom moving up.

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.