An American Tragicomedy …in 3 Acts!

Imagine a fictional job applicant. He can’t spell the words, such as “heal” and “tap.” He thinks there's an African country called “Nambia.” He's under the impression that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive. Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he’s not fictional, and the job he secured, in 2016, was President of America.

After President Warren Harding’s inaugural address in 1921, H L Mencken wrote, “No other such complete and dreadful nitwit is to be found in the pages of American history.” Mencken should've added, “….so far.”

Welcome to the survival of the dumbest.

Act I: RIDICULE

Not so long ago, if a candidate’s dumbness became too obvious, the results could be dire: contempt and political oblivion. In this act, two men traversed this minefield with wildly contrasting results: Ronald Reagan, whose talents distracted us from his ignorance. Dan Quayle, whose ignorance distracted us from his talents. To this day, those talents stay unknown!

In the mid-1960s, a candidate stuck to a script that fooled enough of the people enough of the time. It helped that he’d spent years in Hollywood memorizing lines and enacting them with spectacular sincerity, even when acting opposite a chimp. His name was Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was more responsible for the rise of ignorance than for the fall of communism. Today, more than 4 decades after he entered the White House and took his first nap, his disciples “worship him like a prophet, an oracle, the Yoda of ignorance.”

• Reagan's acolytes have lavished him with the type of hagiographies normally reserved for the Dalai Lama. His longtime pollster Dick Wirthlin felt that calling his ex-boss the Great Communicator wasn’t effusive enough; he called his book The Greatest Communicator.
• In a bold leap of imagination, they've tried to recast him as a deep thinker. In 2018, an author named Prof David Byrne published a book called Ronald Reagan: An Intellectual Biography. Stunningly, it somehow spans 200 pages!
• In one example of Reagan's brilliance, he quotes a 1964 address called “A Time for Choosing”: “We're spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we'd be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year.”
• Here he is in 1978: “There were two Vietnams, north and south. They had been separate nations for centuries.” (More like since 1954.) In 1979: “80% of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees”. No wonder a California legislator remarked, “You could walk through Reagan's deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet.”
• Reagan's knack for making up facts became the platinum standard for politicians. Byrne claims Reagan's “greatest intellectual gift” was his imagination. As president, Reagan found another use for his imagination: attributing quotes to historical figures who never said them. In 1984, Reagan declared, “Churchill once said that Americans did not cross the ocean, cross the mountains, and cross the prairies because we're made of sugar candy.” This time, Reagan came closer to quoting something Churchill actually said; sadly, he said it to Canadians! Reagan was such a fabulist that even a story about him making something up turned out to be made-up. He had every opportunity to become well-informed, but his unique talent for closed-mindedness shielded him from unnecessary enlightenment. The ideas inside his head were “as immovable as the Brylcreemed hair on top of it.”
• His campaign manager Stu Spencer posted this motto on his office wall: “If you can't dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bull.” This approach would be tested with Reagan, who “lacked the former but abounded with the latter.” Welcoming the Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew to the White House, he said, “It gives me great pleasure to welcome PM Lee Kuan Yew and Mrs. Lee to Singapore.” During a meeting with Pope John Paul II, at least, he didn’t mangle the pontiff’s name; he just dozed off.
• He was admirably candid: “We are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we're going to succeed.” As the economy proved resistant to Reaganomics, his approval rating sank to a woeful 35%, barely higher than his films’ ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. His fans and detractors mostly agree he made the world a better place when he stopped making movies!
• Even with the president napping, the White House wasn’t rudderless: it was being guided by the stars. His wife Nancy's belief in astrology—specifically in astrologer Joan Quigley—filled the leadership vacuum. But Quigley wasn't the only one pondering the heavens. According to Gorbachev, Reagan once asked him, in all seriousness, “would you help us if the US were attacked by someone from outer space?” These musings were so frequent that, whenever Reagan uncorked one, his national security adviser, Colin Powell, would roll his eyes and say, “Here come the little green men again.”

None of his failures mattered to Republicans who gave him an approval rating in the 80s. Reagan’s performing talent had mitigated the scorn that greeted him when he entered politics, but that feat was deceptive: the Ridicule stage was still in effect, ready to consume an unsuspecting victim, posing a new question: What if a candidate had all of Reagan’s ignorance but none of his talent?

If no one emerged from the Ridicule stage with a brighter smile than Reagan, no one suffered its humiliations more spectacularly than Dan Quayle. One of his profs was astounded by Danny's mental vacancy: “ I looked into those blue eyes, and I might as well have been looking out the window.” Even when his handlers tried to make a speech goof-proof, Bush managed to “snatch incoherence from the jaws of clarity”. But Quayle spewed nonsense worthy of Lewis Carroll on steroids.

• Turning his attention to the cosmos, he declared, “For NASA: space is still a high priority” and “it’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.” His grasp of geography was less secure. “We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe.” And: “I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix.”
• His most glorious gaffes were mind-bending adventures that challenged the linear nature of time: “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”; and “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didnt live in this century.” In other words, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!
• Reading is a good indicator of intellectual curiosity and Quayle “hardly read anything besides his golf score”. His lengthy blank stares in response to questions, often mid-sentence, almost eclipsed the 18mins of silence that gave Richard Nixon's secretary 15 mins of fame! When Quayle began an answer, a viewer could go to the kitchen, fry up an omelet, and return to the TV without fear of missing anything. On a morning show, a Cleveland woman suggested that Quayle be drug-tested. She didn't indicate which drugs she suspected him of using, but they couldn't possibly have been in the performance-enhancing category!
• In 1992, Quayle visited Munoz Rivera Elementary School in Trenton. After a student named Figueroa correctly spelled “potato” on the board, Quayle advised him, “Add a little bit to the end there….You are right phonetically, but ….” As recently as 1992, misspelling a word could damage a politician's career. “Dan Quayle potato” is the most popular Google search involving his name! He became the most unpopular VP in modern history.

Describing his approach to his job, Quayle said, “One word sums up probably the responsibility of any VP, and that one word is ‘to be prepared’”. Circumstances never required Quayle to assume the presidency; one word that sums up probably the Americans’ feeling about that was “to be relieved.”

Act II: ACCEPTANCE

Quayle was the crash test dummy who enabled George W Bush to take the wheel. Without his pathbreaking work in lowering the bar, would we ever have had the Iraq War or the catastrophically-inept response to Hurricane Katrina?

Responding to a supplicant who’d advocated for Bush’s acceptance, the dean of the Univ of Texas School of Law, Page Keeton, wrote, “I am sure young Mr Bush has all the many amiable qualities you describe, and so will find a place at one of the many fine institutions around the country. But not at the Univ of Texas.” Having failed in his attempt to learn anything about torts, Bush would later dedicate himself, as governor of Texas, to tort reform.

In 1999, Bush was interviewed on TV by Andy Hiller, a reporter with a reputation for humiliating politicians in a lightning round. The below transcript captures the ensuing demolition:

MILLER: Can you name the president of Chechnya?

BUSH: No, can you?

MILLER: Can you name the President of Taiwan?

BUSH: Yeah, Lee.

HILLER: Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?

BUSH: The new Pak general, he is just been elected— not elected, this guy took over office.

HILLER: Can you name him?

BUSH: I can't name the general. Can you name the foreign minister of Mexico?

HILLER: No Sir… but I'm not running for president.

A man who wanted to be the next commander in chief had just bombed a foreign policy quiz. He’d answered only 1 out of 4 questions correctly, which would give him an “F”. In unison, the media excoriated the disastrous performance ….. of Andy Hiller!

• “The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant,” said Bush’s communications director. They condemned the quiz and attacked the examiner. Astoundingly, Bush’s “F” on the pop quiz had become an “A” for his campaign. Like the discovery of the double helix, George W Bush’s pivotal pop quiz moment marked the end of the Ridicule stage. Acceptance had begun. Politicians and their advisers now realized that they could flaunt ignorance instead of hiding it. Aided by the fawning media, Bush's ignorance became an asset: something voters could relate to, a sign he was “authentic” and “down-to-earth.”
• At the next debate, he declared, “We have got to work with Nigeria. It's an important continent.” (Possibly overcompensating for that error, as president he would call Africa a nation.) He then moved on to a new target: his incoherence. “More and more of our imports come from overseas.” “To those of you who received awards, and distinctions, I say: well done. And to the C students, I say: you, too can be president of the United States.” His attempt to make sense of the post-Cold War world led to this “heaping bowl of word porridge”: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

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

• Palin believed that the British armed forces were under the command of the Queen. She didn’t know the difference between England and the United Kingdom, and had never heard of Thatcher. She didn't know Africa was a continent and South Africa was an independent country. She was astonishingly uncertain about municipal, state, and federal distinctions—despite being a mayor and governor….. she couldn't locate Afghanistan on a map. Asked who attacked America on 9/11, she suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein. Asked to identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq, she drew a blank.
• In July 2009, Palin abruptly announced her resignation as governor, explaining that the best way for her to serve Alaska wasn’t to serve it anymore. Having displayed her ignorance during campaign, it was now time to monetize it.
• After receiving a $1.25m advance from HarperCollins, Palin huddled with a ghostwriter to concoct a memoir. It exquisitely captures her knack for getting facts wrong. Each chapter starts with an aphorism, allowing her to continue in the famed Reagan tradition of attributing quotes to famous people who never said them. Such bloopers didn’t trouble her fans, who propelled her memoir to No.1 on the NYT best-seller list.
• Palin was the Charles Dickens of the Age of Ignorance. In 2010's America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, Palin decides to flaunt her knowledge of American history. A review of the book, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, inventoried its avalanche of factual errors. Palin refers to John Adams as a “leading participant” in the Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia; this could have been true only if Zoom had existed in 1787, since Adams was 3,500 miles away, serving as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James’s.
• In 2010, she was still bankable—so much that The Learning Channel wanted to go into business with her, despite the obvious risk to a network with the word “learning” in its name.
• “Sarah kept a gun under her bed, but she had no idea how to load it, much less shoot it. She once pulled it out, shook some bullets out of their box, and asked me to show her what to do.” Although the caribou isn’t one of nature’s smaller targets, Palin has trouble hitting it. She misses 4 times before the antlered dude realizes that it’s time to get the heck out of there!

Palin might have been inspired to flex her history muscles by the performance of the Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Her persistent confusion about names, dates, and places sometimes made you wonder if she'd mistakenly downloaded a malicious version of Google. She warned of “the rise of the Soviet Union” in 2011, two decades after it fell. Blasting Obama, she said that he “put us in Libya. He is now putting us in Africa,” seemingly unaware that, by putting us in Libya, he had already put us in Africa! She once suggested that FDR caused the Great Depression by signing into law a tariff she called “Hoot Smalley.” Actually, the tariff she had in mind was signed into law by FDR's predecessor, Herbert Hoover, and was called Smoot-Hawley. We should give her some credit for not referring to the Great Depression as the Date Regression!

Act III: CELEBRATION

We have reached the final leg of our journey. Today in the third stage, Celebration, smart politicians must pretend to be dumb.

Sarah Palin might have had a hate-hate relationship with American history, but only Trump could refer to 9/11 as “7-Eleven." Despite such evidence, there’s still some debate about whether Trump is dumb or smart.

His former national security adviser John Bolton called him “stunningly uninformed.” H R McMaster, the national security adviser who preceded Bolton, allegedly said that Trump had the intelligence of a “kindergartner.”

• Let's start with spelling. Trump's misspellings in office were so abundant that it’s daunting to quantify them; he misspelled a word every 5 days on Twitter. He misspelled his wife's name, Melania, as “Melanie.” And his most Freudian misspelling of all, unpresidented. To give you an idea of how much the politicians’ literacy has declined, Trump's transcription of Quayle’s most famous quotation would read “What a waist it is to loose one’s mind.”
• After boasting, in 2020, “I know South Korea better than anybody,” he declared that Seoul had a population of 38 million, overshooting the correct answer by 28 million! His biggest math mistake, though, was one he made in his first budget, in 2017, That goof totalled $2 trillion. To put this number in context, for $2 trillion George W Bush could have launched another totally pointless war in Iraq!
• Trump's ignorance of geography, however, makes Bachmann look like Google Maps. “After I had won, everybody was calling me from all over the world. I never knew we had so many countries.” (So it was no surprise that he referred to Prince Charles as the “Prince of Whales”.) He also didn’t know the difference between England and Great Britain.
• As for Trump's use of punctuation, that subject is too broad to be addressed even in an article of this length and should be reserved for a doctoral thesis.

However, as Sarah Palin asked so insightfully: “Does any of this really matter?” To millions of his supporters, the answer is no. To them, Trump is successful, smart, and well-informed. In his 1977 interview, Richard Nixon made his notorious declaration: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump’s fans apply a similar rule.

In a vast ocean of ignorance and failure, Trump captivates by bragging, bullying, and, like Reagan, narrating tales of dubious veracity. His thirst for the spotlight found a perfect ally in the media's voracious appetite for stories. He might call the press “the enemy of the people,” but for decades it was his best friend.

Because stories explain the world to us, we'll believe them even if they aren't true. Plato believed that rational argument could not take hold in a culture until all storytellers were forcibly expelled.

NYT Editorial Board wants Biden to step aside on July 4 for the sake of the country. He would then go down in history forever as a true American patriot.

Only 4 qualifications are necessary to become an American president. Article II of the constitution requires presidents to be natural-born citizens who have reached 35 years of age and lived in America for 14 years. The 22nd Amendment adds that candidates must not have been elected twice to the job previously.

Just as a Stephen King novel might inspire you to bolt your doors, perhaps these horror stories will rouse Democrats to action. Is there any reason for them to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Trump’s flaws and Biden’s age?????

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