In a fresh round of inflammatory rhetoric this week, former U.S. President Donald Trump targeted two of the nation’s most high-profile Black leaders — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries — with a uniquely derogatory label: “low IQ person.”
While insulting opponents across the political spectrum has become a trademark of Trump’s public persona, deployed across social media, campaign rallies, official statements and even in direct exchanges with reporters, this particular jab carries uniquely sharp racial baggage in the American context that makes it stand out as particularly jarring.
Jackson, a double Harvard graduate who made history as the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court, drew Trump’s ire on Wednesday, when he dismissed her as “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench.” She is far from the only person of color in Democratic politics to face this specific attack from Trump. Other targets have included U.S. Representatives Jasmine Crockett, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Rashida Tlaib and Maxine Waters. When targeting Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, Trump extended the slur beyond the lawmaker to broadly brand all immigrants from the Horn of Africa nation as “low IQ people.” He has also applied the label to his 2024 presidential election rival Kamala Harris, calling her “a moron,” “stupid” and “a very low IQ individual.”
Though Trump has occasionally used the same insult against white political opponents and critics — including former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a loyal ally, and conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who have broken with Trump over his stance on the Iran conflict — the phrase is deployed far more often against people of color, and particularly Black women.
Experts emphasize that the slur is deeply offensive to the Black American community due to its long ties to white supremacist ideology that has falsely claimed Black people have inherently diminished cognitive capacity, justifying their forced exploitation for manual labor throughout centuries of slavery and oppression.
“Trump’s characterization of people of color as ‘low IQ’ is a racist dog whistle with a long history in the US,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communication studies professor at Colorado State University, told Agence France-Presse. During the era of colonialism and 19th-century chattel slavery, Anderson explained, “white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of color and, thus, divinely appointed for leadership.”
Trump’s repeated recent use of the phrase aligns with a growing preoccupation among the American far-right with discredited pseudosciences including phrenology — the debunked field that claims skull size and shape can be used to measure a person’s intelligence — and race-based pseudoscience around genetics. “An interest in phrenology has resurged during Trump’s second presidential campaign,” Anderson noted.
This discredited “race science,” which claims IQ is inherently tied to racial characteristics, has long festered in private far-right online chat groups. But in recent years, it has increasingly moved into mainstream right-wing media platforms that reach audiences of millions. Earlier this month, right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, who counts six million YouTube subscribers, hosted a Republican lawmaker for a discussion claiming that many migrants from “third world” countries are incompatible with American culture. Johnson explicitly suggested that lower average cognitive capacity should be a reason to restrict immigration from these nations, claiming “The average IQ in Somalia hovers around 70, and that’s the threshold for mentally handicapped.”
Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University, told AFP that IQ tests are widely overvalued in public discourse, and only offer “moderate” utility for predicting real-world professional and personal success. Even so, their reputation as a rigorous scientific metric gives bigoted claims about racial differences in IQ a false veneer of academic credibility, lending cover to openly racist arguments.
While some high-profile far-right figures — including white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort — openly promote extremist racial ideology, Trump has generally steered clear of explicitly racist language. Anderson explains that coded phrases like the “low IQ” slur offer a key rhetorical benefit: built-in deniability for both the speaker and their audience. “So, Trump and his audience can say that there’s nothing racist about ‘low IQ’ because that label could be applied to anyone,” she said. “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 favorably.”
For his part, Jeffries — who Trump called a “totally low IQ person” earlier this week — pushed back quickly against the attack. “What’s so ironic is that Donald Trump is clearly the dumbest person ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he told MSNBC.