ChatGPT Was Asked To List Everyone Trump Has Called ‘A Low-IQ Individual’ — And It’s Pretty Racist

On Sunday, President Donald Trump sat down for a wide-ranging interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and in characteristic form, he took some time to call out his haters.

“[Democrats] have a new person named [Jasmine] Crockett,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker while speaking about the state of the Democratic party. “I watched her speak the other day, and she’s definitely a low-IQ person.”

Crockett, who represents Texas in the House of Representatives and frequently criticizes the president, has become a target of Trump as her star has risen among the Democrats.

Trump’s remarks on Sunday mirror comments he made about her back in March, when he said, “She’s a lowlife, and she’s a very low-IQ person.”

As she’s done in the past, Crockett responded directly to the president’s taunts, writing on X on Sunday: “For you to be in charge of the WHOLE country, you sure do have my name in your mouth a lot. Every time you say my name, you’re reminding the world that you’re terrified of smart, bold Black women telling the truth and holding you accountable. So keep talking…”

Trump has long held up IQ as the be-all, end-all measure of self-worth. (He’s equally obsessed with “good genes,” and others’ ― usually migrants’ ― “bad genes.”) But when he’s claiming a critic is a “low-IQ person” or “individual,” it’s usually a Black woman he’s targeting.

“I listened to President Trump call Rep. Jasmine Crockett a ‘low IQ individual’ and I realized I had heard that before, so put the question to ChatGPT,” NPR “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” host Peter Sagal wrote on Bluesky Sunday, alongside a screengrab of his results: ChatGPT pointed out that Trump had called Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California) “an extraordinarily low IQ person” while repeatedly lobbing “low IQ” barbs at Vice President Kamala Harris.

Sagal isn’t the first to notice this habit. As David Smith of the Guardian noted in 2018, Trump has insulted the intelligence of male critics ― calling former Sen. Mitt Romney “one of the dumbest” candidates in the history of the GOP and the late Sen. John McCain a “dummy” ― but he’s just as likely to deem them a “pompous ass” or a “loser.”

When it’s Black public figures he’s attacking, he tends to denigrate them on the basis of their intelligence alone.

Throughout the presidential election, Trump derided Harris, his opponent, as “dumb,” “mentally unfit,” “slow” and “stupid,” and of course, an “extremely low-IQ person.”

In March, he also suggested Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) ― another “low-IQ individual” in Trump’s book and a Black man ― should be forced to take an IQ test after the congressman was removed from the president’s address to Congress and later censured by the House.

High-IQ individuals are also intriguing to Trump, but they’re almost always white like him: Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and Trump adviser, is a “seriously high-IQ individual.” (So is Musk’s son, X, according to Trump, though he’s just 5.) In 2016, Trump said his Cabinet ― which only had three people of color in leading positions ― had “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”

And Trump loves to trumpet his own IQ, calling it “one of the highest.” The president has also called himself a “very stable genius” on multiple occasions.

The president’s mode of speech ― the markedly different way he speaks about Black people’s intelligence versus white people’s ― reeks of racism, said Carrie Gillon, a linguist and the cohost of “Vocal Fries,” a podcast about linguistic discrimination.

“It’s absolutely evident that he thinks Black people have lower IQs than white people — and believes IQ is an important and real way to measure intelligence, and that there is only one kind of intelligence,” Gillon told HuffPost.

“The history of IQ is racist and eugenicist, and would take a lot to unpack,” Gillon noted. “But ultimately: Talking about IQ, particularly in this way, is racist,” she said.

When IQ tests were introduced in the 20th century, eugenicists and ethnocentrics latched onto them to argue that a person’s intelligence was influenced by their biology. (Eugenics ― a pseudoscientific idea that’s experiencing an unnerving resurgence ― is broadly defined as the use of selective breeding to improve the human race.)

“They held up the apparent gaps these tests illuminated between ethnic minorities and whites or between low- and high-income groups,” Daphne Oluwaseun Martschenko, an assistant professor at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, wrote in The Conversation in 2017.

“In their darkest moments, IQ tests became a powerful way to exclude and control marginalised communities using empirical and scientific language,” Oluwaseun Martschenko wrote.

“Supporters of eugenic ideologies in the 1900s used IQ tests to identify ‘idiots,’ ‘imbeciles,’ and the ‘feebleminded,’” she explained. “These were people, eugenicists argued, who threatened to dilute the White Anglo-Saxon genetic stock of America.”

Today, critics of IQ tests have argued that the “cultural specificity” of intelligence makes the tests biased toward the environment they were developed in, which is, more often than not, white and Western societies.

What’s interesting to Megan Figueroa, a linguist at the University of Arizona, and the co-host of The Vocal Fries, is the compliments Trump does extend to famous Black people.

“I find it striking how it compares with how he talked about Deion Sanders’ ‘phenomenal genes,’” Figueroa said. “He believes that Black people can have so-called good genes when it comes to sports, but otherwise are ‘low-IQ individuals.’ It’s just blatant racism.”

Jennifer Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” sees Trump’s insult of Crockett as just another example of his use of an ad hominem attack to dodge criticism and accountability.

“By using this rhetorical strategy ― one of his favorites ― he’s able to avoid the issue being debated or the criticism and rerouting our attention to the person who made the criticism, ” said Mercieca, a professor in the department of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University.

“Since Crockett is ‘a low IQ person,’ her criticisms of him don’t even require a response, they’re invalid and unimportant,” she said. “This allows Trump to insult his opposition without ever having to answer the question. It’s a strategy that works the same way whether there is a racial dynamic or not.”

For her part, Crockett hasn’t shied away from engaging directly with the president’s schoolyard ad hominems.

Last month, while appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, Crockett said she would “absolutely” take an IQ test “publicly, head to head” against the president.

The Texas lawmaker also gives the president a taste of his own medicine at times, which may be why she’s gotten under his skin so much lately.

Not mincing words during a House Oversight Committee hearing last September, Crockett called Trump “simpleminded” and “under-qualified.”