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

by Andy Borowitz

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, a point that the historian Richard Hofstadter seemed to be making in his 1963 book, 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.

during the so-called Information Age. By elevating candidates who can entertain over those who can think, mass media have made the election of dunces more likely. Fact-free and nuance-intolerant, these human sound-bite machines have reduced our most complex problems to binary oppositions: us versus communists; us versus terrorists; and that latest crowd-pleaser, us versus scientists.

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. How can we tell if a politician is intellectually curious? Reading habits are a good place to start.

To believe that Trump’s presidency came out of nowhere, without warning, is the political version of creationism. I, on the other hand, believe in devolution. The election of a serially bankrupt, functionally illiterate reality TV host was the logical consequence of the five decades preceding it, which, with apologies to Edith Wharton, I’ll call the Age of Ignorance. How did the bar for our political figures fall so far? To better understand this heinous half century, I’ve divided it into the Three Stages of Ignorance: Ridicule, Acceptance, and Celebration.

Reagan was more responsible for the rise of ignorance than for the fall of communism. Like Chuck Yeager shattering the sound barrier, Reagan tested the outer limits of vacuity; the dullards he inspired all stand on his denim-clad shoulders. Today, more than four decades after he entered the White House and took his first nap, his disciples worship him like a prophet, an oracle, the Yoda of cluelessness.

By the time Reagan became governor of California, in 1967, intellectuals were his piñatas of choice, with the students and faculty at UC Berkeley a regular target for bashing. In his most damning broadside, he said that California’s taxpayers shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” Harsh!

Reagan liked to tell stories of wartime heroism into which he photoshopped himself as the star. He told the Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal about his role in liberating Nazi concentration camps, a feat made even more impressive by his having spent the entire war on soundstages in California.

And though he nailed the audition, California’s new governor was unprepared for the role. Lou Cannon wrote, “He did not know how budgets were prepared, how bills were passed, or who it was in state government who checked the backgrounds of prospective appointees… [H]e didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing, or how he was supposed to spend his time.”

However, television, which showed Reagan such love, often made Jerry appear tongue-tied and slow-witted. Even more unfairly, it made him look like an oaf. Ford was one of our most athletically gifted presidents, a linebacker who led the Michigan Wolverines to two back-to-back championship seasons and received offers to play for both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers. When he was vice president, though, cameras captured him maiming spectators with errant golf balls; as president, he tripped down the steps of Air Force One. By contrast, Reagan’s famous turn as George “The Gipper” Gipp, in the 1940 biopic Knute Rockne: All American, created the impression that he’d been a football star. In reality, the coach of his Eureka College Red Devils football squad remembered him as “just a fellow who wanted to play football but didn’t have too much talent.”

Reagan’s zinger had the unintended consequence of making premeditated wisecracks an obligatory feature of future presidential debates. In 1984, former vice president Walter “Fritz” Mondale belittled Senator Gary Hart’s “new ideas” campaign theme by weaponizing the catchphrase of a then popular Wendy’s commercial, “Where’s the beef?” Mondale might have congratulated himself for being the first presidential aspirant to repurpose the rhetoric of a hamburger chain, but he couldn’t rest on his laurels as an insult comic for long: the master of the art form, Ronald Reagan, would best him in their eventual fall matchup.

It’s commonplace for commanders in chief to age visibly from the burdens of the office, but not the Gipper. As Cannon noted, “Reagan may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.”

You might wonder how creating a crazily expensive new weapons system squared with Reagan’s inaugural pronouncement “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Once Reagan got to the White House, he decided government was the solution to a shit ton of problems: big ones, like how to monstrously increase the military arsenal of the United States, and small ones, like how to illegally increase the military arsenal of the Nicaraguan Contras. 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. (Math is yet another stupid thing.)

Reagan reserved his most scathing commentary about the laziness of others for a woman he made famous as the “welfare queen.” At almost every stop during his 1976 campaign, he told his reliably all-white audiences, “There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting [sic] deceased husbands… And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.” (Perhaps fearing that his story lacked sufficient punch, he later upgraded the number of her aliases from 80 to 127.) His invocation of the welfare queen became so relentless that the humorist Calvin Trillin wrote, “If a cherry tree in the White House Rose Garden got chopped down and all the evidence pointed to Ronald Reagan, he would say, ‘I cannot tell a lie; there’s a lady in California who picks up her welfare check every week in a Cadillac.’ ”

Given his lack of interest in HUD, it’s no surprise that Morning in America was also Twilight of Housing. Thanks to Reagan’s draconian housing cuts, homelessness, which had historically been a temporary problem during economic calamities, became chronic. According to Peter Dreier, the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, “Every park bench in America—everywhere a homeless person sleeps—should have Ronald Reagan’s name on it.” The Gipper’s

“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.”

He refused even to utter the word AIDS until 1985, after thousands of Americans had perished. Even more shockingly, he permitted his press secretary, Larry Speakes, to treat the virus as one big joke.

Bush, sixty-four, sought to add youth to the ticket with Quayle, a dewy forty-one.XIII More important, Bush was unpopular with women, while Quayle, in Bush’s infinite wisdom, was catnip for the ladies. This generous assessment of Quayle’s magnetism was widespread among Republican insiders, nearly all of whom, it’s worth noting, were men.

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.”

his utter lack of the talent necessary to conceal his lack of knowledge. 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.

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

Given how often Bush revealed his ignorance, you could be forgiven for wondering how the hell he got elected governor in 1994. The narrative advanced by Bush partisans was that he dazzled Texans in a televised debate with the incumbent Democrat, Ann Richards. (The race was something of a grudge match for Bush, since the salty Richards had landed that “silver foot” zinger about W.’s dad at the 1988 DNC.) The truth is a little more complicated.

Like Yale and DKE, the Bush family tradition of appearing genteel while weaponizing bigotry was part of W.’s inheritance.

His signature accomplishment as governor was turning the bountiful budget surplus inherited from Ann Richards into a massive deficit, by recklessly cutting taxes.

Dubya, once in danger of becoming the next Quayle, had rewritten the rules. Rather than try to answer questions that baffled him, as his fellow Deke had so torturously done, Bush would project calm acceptance of how little he knew. Aided by the largely fawning media, Bush’s ignorance became an asset: something voters could relate to, a sign he was “authentic” and “down-to-earth.” When W. expressed scorn for Yale classmates who had “all the answers,” he was onto something. After all, no one likes a know-it-all. Especially one named Al Gore.

Although Bush’s lack of intellectual curiosity proved a source of populist appeal during the campaign, it was less than an ideal attribute in the months leading up to 9/11, 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.”

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.

The beer quiz has been a staple of stupid campaign coverage ever since, underscoring the condescending assumption that voters want a president who, in the pollsters’ parlance, is just like them. 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 a presidential candidate, Obama faced serious obstacles. He was a Black man in a country that had elected only white presidents, at least a dozen of whom had, at one time or another, enslaved Black people. He had foreign-sounding first and last names, and a middle name that also belonged to a Middle Eastern tyrant the U.S. military had chased into a spider hole. For voters who weren’t prone to racism or xenophobia, there was the question of his inexperience: at the time he announced his candidacy, he had served in the United States Senate only two years. Still, to some commentators, none of these obstacles was as daunting as this: he reminded them of—RUN FOR COVER!—Adlai Stevenson.

To many, Palin remains a joke, because when they think of her they’re thinking of Tina Fey’s impersonation. The comedian’s mockery dogged Palin: At Target, a shopper trolled her by yelling, “Oh my God! It’s Tina Fey! I love Tina Fey!” (Other customers were amused; Palin left the store in a huff and drove off.) Fey’s imitation became so iconic that, to this day, many people believe that Palin said, “I can see Russia from my house,” when in fact she never said anything so concise. It was McCain, not Palin, who first made the laughable claim that Alaska’s proximity to Russia somehow prepared her to be commander in chief. Though she later concurred, in an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, what she told Gibson was technically true: from Alaska’s Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait, you can see Vladimir Putin’s homeland. But, as we learned from the story about Al Gore inventing the internet, in the Information Age jokes travel faster than information.

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

In her book Notes from the Cracked Ceiling, Anne E. Kornblut reported that the testosterone-heavy McCain team reached its conclusion about Palin’s appeal to women without consulting one key demographic: any actual women.

As reported in Game Change, McCain was unprepared for what Palin had wrought: “He was startled by the crazies at his rallies. Who were they?” They’d be back after Obama’s victory, when they’d call themselves the Tea Party.

Three years later, McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, expressed remorse about choosing the VP candidate he’d once called “a star.” “I think that she helped usher in an era of know-nothingness and mainstreamed it in the Republican Party to the detriment of the conservative movement,” he said. “And I think her nomination trivialized American politics, and had a lot of results that I’m not particularly comfortable with… [I]t was a mistake.”

After receiving a $1.25 million advance from HarperCollins, the publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch, Palin huddled with a ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, to concoct a memoir called Going Rogue: An American Life. We’ll never know what each woman contributed, but the book exquisitely captures Palin’s knack for getting facts wrong. Each chapter begins with an aphorism, allowing her to continue in the proud Reagan tradition of attributing quotations to famous people who never said them. The biggest howler is the one that kicks off chapter 3: “Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it—with their lives.” Though Palin assigns this nugget of wisdom to the famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, its actual author was the Native American activist John Wooden Legs. Such bloopers didn’t trouble Palin’s fans, who propelled Going Rogue to number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

TLC, formerly home to such reality shows as Jon & Kate Plus 8, announced that it was picking up Sarah Palin’s Alaska, which the channel described as a show “about the remarkable Governor Palin.”

Tea Party overlord. Ultimately, there was only one governing principle uniting this unwieldy group: the conviction that Barack Hussein Obama was Satan. (Even on this topic, though, there was some disagreement, as Tea Partiers split over whether the president was a communist, a Nazi, or both.)

Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist running for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, was one Tea Party aspirant grateful for the Palin nod. “Governor Palin is providing tremendous leadership as the Tea Party movement and constitutional conservatives strive to take our country back,” he declared.

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.

So extreme were Santorum’s evangelical views that it sometimes seemed as though he were running not for president but for a slot in the Holy Trinity. In an interview with a Christian blog, he said, “One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.’ It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

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!)

In his ignorance, though, Trump has lapped all his clueless forebears. Sarah Palin might have had a hate-hate relationship with American history, but only Trump could refer to 9/11 as “7-Eleven.” Despite such evidence, there’s still some debate about whether Trump is dumb or smart. On one side are people with firsthand knowledge of Trump. On the other is Trump.

His belief in his own super-genius status inspired this tweet, in 2013: “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest—and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” Four years later, he was frustrated that people still hadn’t realized how smart he was, despite someone’s frequent reminders: “You know, people don’t understand. I went to an Ivy League college. I was a nice student. I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”

he noted, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.”

To resolve this debate, let’s ask a version of my favorite question: What does Donald Trump know? Let’s start with his language skills. According to the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, commissioned by the U.S. Navy in 1975 to determine the readability of training manuals, Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level—lower than the fifteen most recent presidents. Contradicting Trump’s famous self-assessment on the 2016 campaign trail—“I know words. I have the best words”—he doesn’t use many different ones.

Trump’s aversion to reading the work of non–Third Reich authors posed a challenge to those at the White House charged with keeping him semi-informed. According to an email attributed to his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, “It’s worse than you can imagine… Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

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.”

Bill Bryan, the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology division, had just made the seemingly innocuous remark that “the virus dies the quickest in the presence of direct sunlight.” This was Trump’s cue to offer some intriguing scientific hypotheses. “So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light—and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it,” he said,

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute,” he continued. “And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

According to the Wichita Eagle, in the aftermath of Trump’s comments, “the Kansas Poison Control Center reported a more than 40 percent increase in cleaning chemical cases.” Fortunately, there were no reported incidents of people trying to swallow flashlights.