President Donald Trump’s penchant for characterizing pretty much any Black person who disagrees with him as “low IQ” hasn’t been called out enough as the nasty, unrepentant bigotry it is. Many Americans have come to tolerate all sorts of insults from Trump, but it’s important that we as a country condemn this racist filth, if only for the sake of Black children growing up during Trump’s presidency.

Trump expressed doubts about the intelligence of ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith after the commentator, a huge New York Knicks fan, correctly predicted that his team would lose Monday’s NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden against the San Antonio Spurs if Trump showed up. After the game, a reporter, who mentioned that Smith has flirted with the idea of running for president in 2028, asked Trump about his comments. The president replied, “I think he’s a nice guy. You need a certain aptitude to run for president. You need a high IQ. I’m not sure that Stephen has that. I don’t think he does, actually.”

You need a certain aptitude to run for president. You need a high IQ. I’m not sure that Stephen has that.

President donald trump on ESPN’S stephen a. smith

Trump has called Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “a low-IQ person.” In a May 1 social media post, he stacked up racist tropes when he wrote, “Low IQ Democrat Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, is nothing but a THUG, and he is a danger to our Country!” Speaking about Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, Trump said, “This is a low IQ person who I can’t even believe is a congressperson.” And Trump said then-Vice President Kamala Harris was so “low IQ” and “dumb” that she didn’t have the “mental capacity” to debate him.

One might think that New York Attorney General Letitia James prevailing against Trump in court in February 2024 was a sign of her intelligence, but Trump would later describe her as having a “big, nasty, and ugly mouth,” and as “a Low IQ individual.” Way back in 2018, he called Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”

After Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., heckled Trump during his State of the Union address, he said, “Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib … screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union.” His inclusion of Tlaib is evidence that he has targeted people who aren’t Black with the “low IQ” insult. In October, after he took a cognitive test, he said of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., “AOC is low IQ” and said she should be made to take “the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. Those are very hard.”

Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly and former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene are among the few white people Trump has called “low IQ,” but according to Mother Jones, which examined four years of posts on his social media site, Trump mostly uses “low IQ” for “Black public figures and legislators.” His occasional use of the insult for a white person does not diminish the racism he’s employing the rest of the time. 

After all, in one of his many vicious rants about Somalis in the United States, Trump said, “They come to our country — low IQs — and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.” In a 2024 interview with Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr. referred to Haitians as having low IQs and then added, “It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

Here’s a fact: Racism has long been baked into the design and interpretation of IQ tests. In “The Eugenic Origins of IQ Testing,” a 2008 article in the DePaul Law Review, Ajitha Reddy notes that many people who favor such tests wrongfully assume that:

1) intelligence is static; (2) it can be precisely measured; (3) it is possible to design a testing instrument capable of peeling back layers of political and socioeconomic shrouding to reveal a true essence of intelligence; (4) this essential intelligence can be expressed with a single number or with several numbers; and (5) the purpose of unmasking this essential intelligence is to allow society to identify and promote the best and brightest among us.

The truth is that no such test exists.

In what she correctly terms “our fake meritocracy,” Reddy notes that “intelligence tests serve only as predictive measures of achievement (aptitude for success within the status quo) or as measures of oppression and social disadvantage.”

It’s an offense to suggest that an intelligence test can determine the worth of a person or that it should have a role in whether certain nationalities can enter the United States. But setting aside that, and the biases inherent in the tests, there’s no reason to believe any of the Black people Trump has labeled “low IQ” would perform poorly on an IQ test, and there’s no reason to believe Trump would outperform any of them on such a test.

But it’s a losing game to even try to prove a racist stereotype — if only because it suggests that the person expressing that stereotype deserves a response. Besides, what one of Trump’s Black critics would actually score on a test has never been Trump’s point. He seeks only to promote the slander that Black people are less than fully human.

Trump’s “low IQ” insult shouldn’t be labeled crass or impolite or rude, and it shouldn’t be laughingly dismissed as Trump being Trump. It should be labeled as hateful and racist. And every journalist who reports that Trump has disparaged yet another Black person’s intelligence needs to refuse to hide behind more innocuous words like “insults.” Call it racism. Because that’s what it is.

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