Trump's tactic to attack black people and women: insult their intelligence
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
An analysis of the Trump Twitter Archive website shows that the US president has used the words “dumb” or “dummy” 236 times since 2011, and on 14 occasions since becoming taking office in January last year. He has targeted men and women, black and white.
But whereas the likes of James Comey, John McCain and Mitt Romney receive a smorgasbord of other insults, the congresswoman Maxine Waters and TV host Don Lemon, both of whom are African American, appear to be denigrated for their intelligence alone.
“Trump’s made the same criticism of black athletes, black journalists and black Members of Congress,” Peter Wehner, a veteran of three Republican administrations, tweeted last week . “He attacks their intelligence. His racist appeals aren’t even disguised anymore.”
Trump has reportedly referred to Waters as “low IQ” seven times already this year, often at high-profile campaign rallies, most recently in Ohio, where he called her “a seriously low-IQ person” before a cheering crowd. He has had little to say about other aspects of Waters’ personality or policies.
To be sure, it is not the first time he has mocked individuals’ intelligence quotient. When the Hollywood actor Robert De Niro declared “Fuck Trump!” at the Tony awards in June, the president gave a one-off response: “Robert De Niro, a very Low IQ individual, has received to many shots to the head by real boxers in movies.”
In 2015 he also wondered why the Washington Post has “low IQ people” and suggested that Governor Rick Perry of Texas “should be forced to take an IQ test”.
Perry is now energy secretary.
But his attack on Waters’ IQ is by far his most sustained. Michael Cornfield, associate professor of political management at George Washington University in Washington, said: “The strategic value is obvious: Waters is a quadruple-category demon to please Trump’s base, being black, female, leftist and aggressive in her own rhetoric.
“But it is short-term and high risk. Should the Democrats take control of the House, Waters is first in line to become chair of the financial services committee. She’ll subpoena his financial records before the sun goes down on the first day of the new session.”
has been consistently targeted by Trump.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As for “dumb”, a word that seldom passed the lips of past presidents, it is clearly one of Trump’s favourites. Five years ago, long before his attack on Lemon, he anointed the TV host and comedian Bill Maher “the dumbest man on television” . Earlier this year he wrote of the former FBI director James Comey: “He’s either very sick or very dumb.” He has come up with myriad other insults for Comey, often not related to his mental capacity.
Yet Trump has now called Lemon “dumb” three times, most recently last week , when he also took a swipe at an African American basketball player: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!” The controversial post has been retweeted nearly 50,000 times, far more than any other Trump use of “dumb”.
The CNN journalist responded on air: “Referring to African Americans as dumb is one of the oldest canards of America’s racist past and present: that black people are of inferior intelligence. This president constantly denigrates people of color and women.”
Trump’s attacks on African Americans come in the context of his past as a proponent of the “birther” movement, questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the US, his moral equivocations over white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, a year ago and the dominance of white men in his political and judicial appointments.
The New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who is African American, wrote last week: “I believe that the fact that he so often attacks the intellectual capacity of women and minorities exposes a racial and gender bias, one that has a long history and a wide acceptance .”
Indeed, Trump has reserved some of his most personal, gratuitous and outrageous insults for women. He wrote of Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic senator for New York: “Someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them)” . He said of the then Fox News host Megyn Kelly there was “blood coming out of her wherever”.
The most powerful man in the world has labelled the broadcaster and author Mika Brzezinski “dumb as a rock” , “Crazy” , “low I.Q.” , “bleeding badly from a face-lift” , “had a mental breakdown while talking about me”, “crazy and very dumb” , “very insecure” , “not very bright” , “neurotic” and “wild with hate” .
Trump’s use of language, and limited vocabulary, is one more way in which he is upending presidential norms. Cornfield lamented: “Dummy. Dumb. It’s enough to make me nostalgic for the profanities and slurs of Richard Nixon and the vulgarities of LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson].”
But as Trump’s rallies testify, it appears to connect with the Trump base. Professor David Crystal, a UK-based linguist and author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, said via email: “What’s been interesting is to hear a mode of speech we associate with informal domestic or street exchange being used by someone in high office. That presumably is what made Trump so appealing to so many, avoiding the high oratory of his predecessor. ‘He talks like us,’ I’ve heard people say.”
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I can be s-o-o-o-o-o naive!
Once again, I took our alt-right propagandists' writing at face value. S-o-o-o-o-o naive!
When I saw all the ugly-photo/racist-dog-whistle attacks on Maxine Waters, I thought our dear friends were just being their usual I-can't-say-this-or-Perrie-will-delete-it selves.
Oh, no! They were channeling their God.
He is racist because he says someone who is stupid has a low IQ? Please. I thought it was Democrats who think minorities are too stupid to carry voter ID. Who's racist? Everyone who disagrees with Obama right Bob?
Man I hope John James runs for president. I can't wait to see the racism and hypocrisy he exposes.
Interesting sentence....
When the Democrats take over the House, Maxine Waters will be the Chairman of the Financial Services Committee with the authority to subpoena Trump's Tax returns and international bank records. Please DO keep poking the BEAR...
The Grizzly is my spirit animal.
Mine also.
I thought for sure it would be a Tiger because of the connection I felt when I came 'up close and personal' with one @ Sea World. But alas, the Grizzly came to me.
Palin's would shoot her spirit animal from a helicopter.
You have to understand something about Trump - he's not very intelligent. That is the reason his one liners and insults are so lame. He doesn't have any imagination and virtually no skills at all with language.
When your favorite insult is to say that someone is "dumb'', you are in a rut. I do agree that Trump repeats it about Waters and Don Lemon because he thinks his political base likes it when he does.
For real? We're going to be mad now that Trump doesn't find a greater variety of insults for women and people of color? You feel left out because what? He's not making fun of Maxine Waters looks or Don Lemon's hands? If he called her ugly wouldn't he be accused of misogyny? And if he said anything about Lemon's appearance, wouldn't he be accused of racism?
You have to be on a serious quest for outrage to complain that some people are being insulted less than others.
But I guess there is something else going on here. For those with Trump Derangement Syndrome, the holy grail is some kind of unassailable proof that Trump is racist. IF you can achieve this, you imagine that will be the final straw. The endless attempts to prove it with things he has said and done already just aren't cutting it. You don't yet have the satisfying universal acceptance that Trump is racist and should therefore be impeached. And so we are presented with this (totally not silly /s) analysis.
Soooo.
According to the article, Trump does it to everyone, but let's just ZERO IN on "One Women that is Black" .
Got it !
The article has some pretty dramatic spin, I will agree with that. But, trump DOES seem to attack women and minorities a lot more than he does white males. We already know he is a racist, so his attacks on minorities isn't much of a surprise.
He seems to attack ALL those he dislikes.....EQUALLY !
Great half argument.
Tons of examples of Trump calling people stupid. I love examples, citations, etc. But then we get to the part about him generously insulting white men in other ways.
Myriad? Oh ok! Often? Ok, I'm settling in with my popcorn. This should be good. Lay out all those "myriad other insults" for me.
My comment was a critique of the seeded argument. I make no claims about Trump and his insults. Citing some other source doesn't impact my criticism of this particular argument.
In other words, "Ooops, I didn't really mean that, I meant something else." This is what you said,
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Do you understand the point of the story and my comment? It's not that Trump insults people a lot. We already knew that. No one disputes it. I certainly wasn't disputing it.
The claim in the story was that Trump insulted Comey on other bases aside from intelligence, but the writer didn't give a single example. And that's pretty strange considering tons of examples were offered of Trump insulting people for their lack of intelligence. Since the writer was in the mood to supply lots of examples - at least for half of his point - why didn't he supply any for the other half of his argument? Usually that's a sign that someone is full of shit.
Him, being an almost white mostly yellow n orange man, should be insulting enough for most any average "white men" gone wild, about a pestilent child living in defiled denial
How unfortunate. Trump wasn't talking about nazis, but that's how it will be remembered, thanks to the media and his political opponents. Remember that the focus of the event was the debate over removing confederate statues. I think they had pulled down a Robert E. Lee statute there. Trump was trying to say there are good people on both sides of that debate. He wasn't endorsing nazis. That should probably have been obvious, but his expressed desire for peace and open-mindedness was warped by people with TDS.
Uh, Trump made his comments after a group of anti-nazi and anti-kkk protesters had been mowed down by a white supremacists car, killing one woman. At that point the time to say "there are good people on both sides" had passed. Trump said it for one reason, he knows that he has racists and white nationalists in his political base. He's an idiot, but even idiots can sometimes recognize the obvious.
Let's see... he said there were fine people on both sides, Nazis were on one side, he didn't specifically give them a "fuck you", so how exactly was he not also talking about them?
You mean thanks to him being a total fucking retard and not taking the least controversial, easiest possible position on any issue ever and saying Nazis are bad?
Yeah, and a bunch of Nazis showed up to try to keep around the statues of people who committed treason in order to maintain a racially based system of slavery. Is this really the hill man?
Good, he was a racist traitor.
So he was saying there are good Nazis.
And he didn't condemn them either. Sorry dude, when it comes to Nazis you are either on one side or the other, there is no middle ground.
Lol man, you really want to die on this hill don't you? No matter how you try to spin it, he said there are good Nazis, end of story. He refused to distance himself from Nazis, in fact he basically said that Nazis and those who oppose them are morally equivalent.
I'm aware of when he made the comments, but as president, how many details do you think he had in mind when he made the comment? What everyone knew going into that day was that there was a debate about statues. There's no reason why he would try to say nazis are good people. Continuing to insist on it defies common sense.
He basically said? Or he said? It can't be both.
This is a problem, and too many people are doing it these days. We restate what somebody else said in a way that makes it worse and we say "he basically said." The fact is Trump did not ever say that nazis and anybody else were morally equivalent. Even the "both sides" part doesn't work for that because there was not one whole side that was 100% nazi. Everybody knows this, but it's more fun to pretend it was all nazis vs good people. That's simply not the facts of the day.
It's racist not to call a dumb person dumb because of their race.
Trump's Tactic To Attack Black People And Women: Insult Their Intelligence
IF IF IF this is one of president trump's tactics its not alone. President trump uses tactics constantly. He was elected because of his tactics. He governs by his tactics, he has seemingly lived all his life using and developing his tactics.
So to be a "victim" of these tactics IMO doesn't mean you should take it personally, it's just our presidents way of operating, negotiating, working, getting ahead, living and now governing.
PS: With trump, his tactics and the republicans in power Whatever happens its their baby lock, stock and barrel. Good Luck America.
A guy who has extreme difficulty even forming a complete sentence, insulting the intelligence of others, is just funny to me.
Trump acts like schoolyard bully and indulges in language and behavior that would get any child expelled from school.
No one in their right mind would teach their own children to act or talk like Trump. Trump is not a role model for anything or anyone of decency.