ESPN's Stephen A. Smith fired back at President Donald Trump on Tuesday after Trump suggested Smith lacked the intelligence to run for president. During a segment on First Take, Smith stood before a projected American flag as 'Hail to the Chief' played in the background.
Smith's Response
'He wants to sit up there and talk about my low IQ?' Smith said. 'I could put my IQ against yours. I got something even better — I could ask you why you’ve been running from me for the past year since I asked you to talk to me. I could ask you to debate me since you think you’re that dude. We could go a myriad of ways.'
Trump’s comment came Monday night as he boarded Air Force One. When a reporter asked how he felt about Smith — who has discussed a potential presidential run — blaming him for the New York Knicks’ Game 3 loss in the NBA Finals, Trump responded: 'I think he’s a nice guy, but you need a certain aptitude to run for president. You need a high IQ. I’m not sure that Stephen has that. I don’t think he does, actually.'
Racist Dog Whistle
Linguists and political experts say Trump’s 'low IQ' remark carries racist undertones. Dr. Karrin Anderson, a communications studies professor at Colorado State University, told HuffPost: 'What distinguishes a dog whistle from just an insult is it is designed to sound innocuous. It is meant to be deniable. The virtue, the rhetorical appeal of a dog whistle, is you can deny that it functions in the way that it is actually designed to function.'
This is not the first time Trump has used the phrase against people of color. Last month, he called House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries a 'thug' and a 'low IQ' person on Truth Social. In April, he labeled Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson the 'new low-IQ person on the court.' During the 2024 presidential election, Trump repeatedly described Vice President Kamala Harris as a 'low-IQ individual.' He has also targeted Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Rep. Maxine Waters, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson with similar insults. Even before his first term, in 2011, Trump questioned former President Barack Obama’s academic credentials.
'He applies it indiscriminately to Black people in different walks of life and professions,' Anderson noted. 'That’s where it reveals that it is a racist dog whistle because it doesn’t relate to anything else.'
Historical Context
Experts highlight the long history of the 'low IQ' dog whistle in the U.S. 'During the colonial era, white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of color, and thus, divinely appointed for leadership,' Anderson said. Megan Figueroa, a research scientist at the University of Arizona’s psychology department and co-host of the 'Vocal Fries' podcast, told HuffPost that this language was 'quickly weaponized.' 'IQ was used to justify heinous behavior like racial segregation and forced sterilizations,' she said.
This thinking was amplified in the late 1990s by the book The Bell Curve, which falsely claimed IQ differences between racial groups were biological. Phrenology, another discredited race science, also upheld scientific racism. 'The proliferation of this kind of racist pseudoscience gave rise to ‘low IQ’ as a thinly, thinly veiled way to be racist,' Figueroa said.
While these ideas have been dismissed as pseudoscience, they remain 'popular in certain conservative circles,' Anderson said. 'Everybody thought we sort of had moved past believing that way. [But] Donald Trump’s political durability and his sustained appeal to at least 40% of the country means that he’s recovered [it] and made [it] speakable.'
Data on Trump's Attacks
According to a study by Truthout, between January 20, 2025, and April 25, 2026, Trump posted 'low IQ' or a variation 24 times. Eight out of every 10 posts were directed at Black or brown people. In the first 10 months of his second term, he did not refer to any white person as having a 'low IQ.' In an April 16 post targeting Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens, Trump wrote: 'You’re born that way, LOW IQ, and there’s not a damn thing they’re going to be able to do about it!'
'It is designed to signal to a specific audience that a speaker shares their ideology or belief systems,' Anderson explained. '[Trump] uses it to refer to Black people and, predominantly but not exclusively, Black women. I think in his mind, because it doesn’t explicitly refer to race, he feels that it is easy to deny that it’s a racist label.'
By repeating the phrase openly, the practice further popularizes the concept. As Harris once put it, Trump’s language seems to have become less a dog whistle and more a bullhorn.
The White House referred to Trump’s comments outside Air Force One when reached for comment. ESPN and Smith’s representative did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request.
