The Trump campaign is really digging deep in the far-right archives for its rhetoric in the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign.
The manifestly unfunny joke by one of his supporters at Madison Square Garden this week that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage” could end up costing Trump the election. But the revival of old discourses of pseudoscientific racism by both Donald Trump and several supporters around him haven’t drawn as much scrutiny. Trump’s obsessive fixation on Kamala Harris’s race and intelligence, with the constant refrain that she is a “low-IQ individual,” has been going on for months.
The insult evokes the racist ideologies of the twentieth century that have recently become more popular in the right-wing manosphere. Their prominence in a modern presidential campaign marks a dangerous devolution in our national politics.
There are plenty of intellectually unimpressive individuals in our political landscape. Our current president is himself no Rhodes Scholar — not now, well into his senility, and not ever. But Trump and his allies aren’t interested in whether Joe Biden is smart. That’s because the far right has only one reason for ever bringing up the measurement of human intelligence at all: the opportunity to claim, falsely, that some racial groups, including black Americans, are genetically less intelligent than others. This is an idea that has been debunked again and again since its early days, but it persists — and has been enjoying a disturbing renaissance recently, thanks to Trump.
Trump used the “low IQ” epithet at his Madison Square Garden rally. But that wasn’t the first time. He often repeats it at his rallies, as well as in his recent interview with Joe Rogan, who lamented in 2018 that, due to the constraints of political correctness, “You can’t even discuss the fact that certain races have low IQ.”
At the Madison Square Garden rally, Tucker Carlson amplified…
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Auteur: Liza Featherstone
