Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) recently slammed President Donald Trump for unleashing a “dog whistle” that encourages his MAGA base to attack her.
During a sit-down interview with CNN’s Laura Coates last week, Crockett was asked to respond to Trump’s attacks the day prior, in which he called the Texas representative and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “very low-IQ” individuals, after a reporter asked for his thoughts on Ocasio-Cortez’s support for Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.
“AOC, look, I think she’s very nice, but she’s very low-IQ, and we really don’t need low-IQ,” the president said at the time. “Between her and Crockett, we’re going to give them both an IQ test to see who comes out best.”
“Now, I took my test. I took a real test at Walter Reed Medical Center and I aced it,” he continued. “I got every one of all those questions right. Now it’s time for them to take a test.” (Many believe the test the president was referring to was a screening tool used to detect cognitive decline, not an IQ test.)
Crockett said in response on CNN that she lives “rent-free” in the president’s mind at “a time in which the American people are suffering,” and that she has not personally met Trump. She then called out the president for dog-whistling to his MAGA supporters.
“The biggest concern I have is that every time he does something, he has minions that see it as a dog whistle, and then it only increases the attacks on myself, as well as any other colleague,” she later continued, before she slammed the president for his tendency to attack women and people of color with jabs surrounding their intelligence.
“He absolutely, consistently buys into this idea ... that women of color somehow are low-IQ,” she said. “Let me be clear, I have a lot more education than he does. It’s just what it is, degree wise — I have earned my degrees. My daddy didn’t have to make a phone call to get me into anything.”
“So we can stop playing games as if I am lesser than,” she added.
Trump has a history of questioning the intelligence of women and people of color. An analysis published in the Guardian in 2018 found that while Trump disparaged men, women and people of all races over their intelligence, he tended to focus on attacks on “IQ” and intelligence alone, when it came to the Black people he targeted.
“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,” Carrie Gillon, a linguist and the co-host of “Vocal Fries,” a podcast about linguistic discrimination, told HuffPost back in May.
And when Trump spews attacks about a woman of color’s “low IQ,” as he did with Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez last week, it’s indeed a “dog whistle to his MAGA base,” said Shaun Harper, a professor of education, business and public policy at the University of Southern California.
“He aims to make himself look smarter than opponents, regardless of their races and genders,” he said. “But in this specific instance, Trump’s dog whistle compels his supporters and others to view highly qualified women of color as unintelligent ‘DEI hires’ who got to where they are for reasons other than merit, intelligence, hard work, and having earned the faith of Americans who voted for them.”
As Crockett alluded to during her appearance on CNN, the Texas representative is often on the receiving end of vile right-wing attacks — which are often riddled with racist and sexist language.
Last month, Crockett’s quip during a hearing on Capitol Hill about first lady Melania Trump’s immigration history spurred an avalanche of disturbing racist attacks online, with people calling the congresswomen “ghetto trash” and “low IQ,” among other offensive remarks.
Harper said that Trump’s baseless claims about Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez’s IQ can influence others to “presume without verifiable test results that their IQs are indeed low.”
“More problematic is how Trump’s followers will extend these same presumptions to other women of color in Congress and elsewhere,” he said.