When US President Donald Trump this week attacked Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, two of America’s most prominent Black figures, he chose a particularly pejorative insult: “low IQ person”.
Trump insults people all the time — online, in speeches, in official statements and directly to the faces of some reporters.
But the “low IQ” jab, with distinct racial overtones in the United States, is especially jarring.
Trump attacked Jackson — a double Harvard graduate and the first Black woman on the Supreme Court — on Wednesday as “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench”.
He has similarly assailed ethnic minority Democratic lawmakers, including Jasmine Crockett, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Rashida Tlaib and Maxine Waters.
While personally targeting Ilhan Omar — a Minnesota representative born in Somalia — the president has also broadly branded immigrants from the Horn of Africa nation as “low IQ people”.
He has used the expression against perceived enemies who are white, such as former lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch ally, as well as commentators Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who have criticised his war against Iran.
But he has applied it more frequently against people of colour —particularly Black women — including 2024 election rival Kamala Harris, whom he called “a moron”, “stupid” and “a very low IQ individual”.
The slur is especially offensive for the Black community, experts said, given how white supremacists have historically pushed claims that they have less brain capacity and are therefore more suited for manual labour.
“Trump’s characterisation of people of colour as ‘low IQ’ is a racist dog whistle with a long history in the US,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, told AFP.
During the periods of colonialism and 19th-century slavery, “white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of colour and, thus, divinely appointed for leadership”.
Trump’s recent repeated use of the expression dovetails with the American far-right’s apparent obsession with genetics and phrenology, a pseudoscience of cranium size and shape as a supposed marker of intelligence.
“An interest in phrenology has resurged during Trump’s second term,” Anderson said.
‘Deniability’
Such so-called “race science” — the discredited theory that IQ is influenced by racial traits — has long simmered in far-right chatrooms, but is now entering more mainstream outlets with audiences numbering in the millions.
Speaking with a Republican lawmaker on “The Benny Show” podcast this month about how some “third world” immigrants are incompatible with American culture, right-wing host Benny Johnson appeared to suggest a lack of mental capacity as a reason for suppressing migrant inflows.
“The average IQ in Somalia hovers around 70, and that’s the threshold for mentally handicapped,” said Johnson, who has six million subscribers on YouTube.
Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, told AFP that IQ tests get “glorified” but are only “moderately” useful in predicting real-world outcomes.
Regardless, the tests help give a scientific veneer to otherwise amateur or even racist discussions.
While far-right commentators, including white nationalist Nick Fuentes — who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago — openly promote more extremist views, the president has largely avoided direct racist language.
The rhetorical advantage of using coded phrases like “low IQ” gives both speaker and listener “deniability”, Anderson said.
“So, Trump and his audience can say that there’s nothing racist about ‘low IQ’ because that label could be applied to anyone,” she added.
“When Trump uses it primarily against Black people, however, and when it’s connected to this very specific history of how Black people have been framed in US culture since the 19th century, the white supremacists and casual racists in Trump’s audience will respond favourably.”
Meanwhile, Jeffries, whom Trump branded a “totally low IQ person” on Monday, shot back: “What’s so ironic is that Donald Trump is clearly the dumbest person ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he told MS NOW.
Header image: US President Donald Trump wears a ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) hat as he attends the commencement ceremony at West Point Military Academy in West Point, New York, US on May 24, 2025. — Reuters/File
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