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

by Andy Borowitz

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.

Age of Ignorance,

Sarah Palin

The inanities she spewed were no more absurd than those of George W. Bush, whose warm embrace of his own ignorance softened the

Quayle’s cluelessness, exposed during the Ridicule stage, consigned him to oblivion. Palin’s, unfurling majestically during the Acceptance stage, guaranteed her best-selling books, well-paid speaking gigs, and a reality TV show. To many,

Fey’s imitation became so iconic that, to this day, many people believe that Palin said, “I can see Russia from my house,”

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.

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.

Jill Loranger Clark, but that account came as a surprise to Clark: “I can honestly tell you I have no idea who she was.” Only Kim “Tilly” Ketchum, a high school classmate who attended North Idaho with Palin, could summon a memorable college anecdote about her. “Someone pulled the fire alarm next to my door,” Ketchum said. “We all were told there is an invisible dye that squirts onto your hand when you pull the alarm and you’re not going to be able to hide. And Sarah looked at her hands, and said, ‘Oh my God, look!’ And she went and confessed.”

Palin’s failure to stay at one college barely long enough to unpack her toothbrush suggested a certain flightiness, her former aide John Bitney

she “had no attention span—with Sarah it was always ‘What’s the flavor of the day?’ ” Many of her colleagues in Alaska would have echoed

Palin proved capable of intense and sustained concentration: when she was engaged in a personal vendetta.

The so-called Troopergate scandal sparked a bipartisan probe conducted by the investigator Stephen Branchflower, whose report concluded that, “in attempting to get Trooper Wooten fired,” Palin had “abused her power as governor.” Coming in at 263 pages, it’s unlikely she read it.

verbal style, featuring run-on sentences that sound like a spilled bag of Bananagrams,

Halcro later observed that Palin was “a master, not of facts, figures, or insightful policy recommendations, but at the fine art of the non-answer, the glittering generality.” She was a direct descendant of Ronald Reagan, who annihilated facts with nonsense like “There you go again.” After trying and failing to cram information

Books were only a teeny sliver of the burgeoning Palin media empire. In 2010, Roger Ailes, the former Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Quayle adviser and now the chairman and CEO of Fox News Channel, gave her a multiyear deal at $1 million per annum. “It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news,” the renowned news junkie said. It wasn’t long, though, before Fox experienced buyer’s remorse. One year later, a source close to Ailes told New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, “He thinks Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid.”

Mark Burnett,

On my s***list

TLC canceled the low-rated series after its initial run. Though something of a setback for Palin, the axing was no big deal for Burnett, who was busy not only with Survivor but with another long-running hit reality show: The Apprentice.

Confronted with Palin—a far less qualified politician than Quayle (I can’t believe I just typed that)—Broder was starting to sound like Bill Kristol shaking his pom-poms.

The Tea Party had emerged, the previous year, as a grassroots movement of mainly older white conservatives. It soon drew the attention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and other powerful Republicans, who lavished it with money and publicity in hopes of manipulating its voters. While the billionaires’ goals were easy to summarize—the elimination of taxes and regulations on their businesses—the actual Tea Partiers’ agenda was more eclectic. They

favored small government, but wanted government to play an active role in kicking immigrants out of the country. They wanted fewer handouts for the young, the poor, and people of color, but wanted government to keep its hands off their own Medicare and Social Security. They worshipped the Constitution,

selectively: they revered the Second Amendment, which allowed them to own guns, but weren’t so keen on the First,...

Paul was alarmingly open about how little he knew. Explaining that he didn’t understand the mining industry

Paul—he was asked how old the Earth was. “I forgot to say I was only taking easy questions,” he said. “I’m gonna pass on the age of the Earth. I think I’m just

Paul would later appoint himself Grand Inquisitor whenever Dr. Anthony Fauci, the world’s most esteemed virologist, testified before the Senate.

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 1...

“Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on camera?” We’ll never know how many votes this reckless moment of sanity cost him, but Buck lost in November.

Fox News, she boasted that she shared a birthplace, Waterloo, Iowa, with the legendary celluloid cowboy John Wayne. Embarrassingly, eagle-eyed fact-checkers realized that Bachmann had confused the birthplace of John Wayne with the onetime home of John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who became known as the Killer Clown. On the plus side, she gave Gacy no credit whatsoever for

signing the Declaration of Independence.

“The third agency of government I would, I would do away with, the Education, the uh, Commerce… and let’s see… I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.” Later that night, Perry would extinguish the suspense that had surely been killing the audience by revealing that the third doomed agency was the Department of Energy. Although he never got a chance to eliminate that department as president, he did the next best thing, serving as energy secretary under Donald J. Trump.XV

2011, to boost her prospects. In its inverted logic, the film’s title couldn’t have been more Palinesque: promoting a politician who, in her only run for national office, had been defeated, the movie was called The Undefeated. Seemingly the work of a high school filmmaker with limited funds and even more limited talent, it relies on Palin’s first-person narration, lifted from the Going Rogue audiobook, as well as a hilariously

The Undefeated was defeated at the box office: while it cost a reported million dollars to produce—all that stock footage was apparently more expensive than it looked—in

it took in a measly $116,381,

Steve Bannon another s***

The name of this filmmaker was Steve Bannon.

In the first stage, Ridicule, dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart. In the second stage, Acceptance, dumb politicians felt free to seem dumb. Today, in the third stage, Celebration, smart politicians must pretend to be dumb.

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.

According to the sworn testimony of his former lawyer Michael Cohen, “[He] directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.” Maybe he feared that, confronted with his sky-high GPA and scores, we losers and haters would feel stupid and insecure.

When it comes to history, Trump’s most common errors involve (1) when events happened, and (2) what happened.

As his niece Mary Trump reveals in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, his older sister, Maryanne, had been doing his homework for him while he was at Fordham, and his brother, Freddy, reached out to a friend in the Penn admissions office. Even with those advantages, “Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him.” It took a village.

“Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline heralding Donald J. Trump’s first appearance on page one of the New York Times. Countersuing, the Trumps unleashed their lawyer, Roy Cohn, the disgraced (and, eventually, disbarred) former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn also served as Ronald Reagan’s political fixer, and his legal argument was

Roy Cohn another s***

judge dismissed the Trumps’ countersuit.

The article also states that he was “a student at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated first in his class in 1968.” A 1984 Times article belatedly corrected this whopper: “Although the school refused comment, the commencement program from 1968 does not list him as graduating with honors of any kind.”

easily turned a reporter from America’s paper of record into a co-creator of his own myth.

The Art of the Deal must be considered the founding document of the Celebration stage of ignorance.

Trump, Schwartz later recalled, was “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Jane

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

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.”

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.

She defines “the Trump way” as “a mix of the nefarious and the ignorant.”