Trump's Latest Posts Give Me an Excuse to Rerun this Piece on His Weird Obsession With IQs From Six Years Ago
As part of her sad, transparent, innately doomed campaign to regain some semblance of her career and social standing, Roseanne has been desperately trying to think up explanations for her infamous Tweet comparing African-American Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape not rooted in vicious racism.
True, she apologized, but once her show got canceled anyway, she walked back that apology and subsequently blamed her Tweet on Ambien while insisting she had no idea Jarrett was black.
In 2013 Roseanne, no doubt under the influence of Ambien, tweeted of African-American Obama advisor Susan Rice, “Susan Rice is a man with big swinging ape balls.” Roseanne has not attempted to explain that one.
Then, on the fourteenth, after much deliberation and soul-searching, Roseanne decided that the Ambien-fueled tweet she’s #sorrynotsorry for was actually metaphorical, tweeting, “Rod Serling wrote Planet of the Apes. It was about anti-Semitism. That is what my tweet referred to—the anti-Semitism of the Iran deal. Low-IQ people can think whatever they want.”
For what it's worth, Rod Serling did not write Planet of the Apes. He's one of two credited screenwriters in the first film adaptation. Also, in keeping with Serling's admirable if screamingly obvious brand of Liberalism, the movie is very overtly about racism, the kind that might lead a powerful white woman to call a powerful black woman an animal and a terrorist because of political differences.
Oh shit! Rod Serling is trolling Roseanne from beyond the grave! That's how awesome he is.
Her Tweet is Trumpia. Roseanne is giving herself credit for playing fifth-dimensional chess with her secretly brilliant and insightful tweet comparing a black woman to an ape. The mouth-breathers, losers, and dummies might look at Roseanne’s tweet and see the ugliness and racism of an unhinged xenophobe and bigot incapable of controlling herself or her bigotry. That’s the one-dimensional chess perspective on the Tweet. The five-dimensional version is that Roseanne was employing such a powerful and complicated, and let’s face it, deeply dishonest and unconvincing metaphor that even she didn’t seem to realize its full nature until she’d pretty much lost everything, professionally and reputation-wise.
The other section of the Tweet that’s deeply Trumpian is when Roseanne links criticizing her to possessing a low I.Q.
Trump is famously obsessed with I.Q. After Robert De Niro articulated the rage and frustration of us all by saying “Fuck Trump” twice at the Tonys, Trump impotently jabbed back by calling De Niro “a very low IQ individual” in a typo-riddled tweet.
If that insults sounds familiar, that might be because Trump previously Tweeted, “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
It’s easy to see why Donald Trump loves to insult the I.Qs of people who criticize him. For Trump, everything is about winning. For Trump, winning is everything, and not in an abstract way. No, for Trump, someone has to be keeping score at all times, but only if that scorekeeper has him strongly in the lead.
That’s why Trump is obsessed with television ratings even more than a former television star and consummate couch potato has any right to be. Ratings separate winners from losers, so it’s not surprising that he congratulated Roseanne on scoring the only thing that matters in his world: massive success, as represented by the huge ratings for the Roseanne reboot.
That also explains why Trump is obsessed with the size of his Presidential victory and insists that, once all the illegal votes are tossed out, he will have won the popular vote as well, something that seems to matter to Trump only.
That’s also why Trump is obsessed with the size of his inauguration, another subject that matters only to Trump. In Trump’s mind, a big crowd equals a win and a modest one a loss, and, as you might remember, Trump promised us so much winning that at a certain point, we’d get tired of winning.
I.Q is the way we keep score in terms of intelligence. It’s been my experience that only two kinds of people care about I.Q and talk about it relentlessly. There are crazed narcissists like, for example, Sharon Stone and James Woods, two high-IQ folks who make the whole Mensa set look bad, and racists out to use IQ to argue for the inherent intellectual superiority of some races over others.
In that respect, is it any surprise Trump and Roseanne love I.Q-based insults?
The wonderful irony of Trump and Roseanne’s obsession with I.Q-based insults is that calling someone “a low IQ individual” or detractors “Low IQ ppl” is actually much dumber than simply calling them a dummy or a maroon. It betrays a child-like faith in the accuracy and meaning of a dumb test that can’t possibly say anything particularly meaningful about a subject as vast and complicated as human potential and intelligence.
So when you see someone tweeting about an enemy's low I.Q., it seems safe to assume the insult comes from a place of intellectual insecurity and not strength. Strong people don’t need to insult the I.Q. of others. Neither do intelligent people. That’s part of what makes them smart.
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