President Donald Trump was booed by fans at Madison Square Garden on Monday, after locking down Midtown Manhattan so he and members of his family and administration could attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals. To cope with the rejection from hometown crowd, Trump fell back on one of his favorite methods of self soothing: calling a Black person dumb.
After sports commentator Stephen A. Smith declared ahead of Monday night’s game that he would blame Trump’s attendance to the game if the New York Knicks lost (they did), Trump responded that while Smith is “a nice guy,” you “need a certain aptitude to run for president — you need a high IQ — I’m not sure he has that. I don’t think he does, actually.”
Trump went on to claim, falsely, that the boos heard in the Garden when he was shown during the pre-game performance of the National Anthem were “mostly cheers.”
Smith — who has toyed with the idea of running for president — criticized Trump for imposing himself, and a host of strict security measures, on the NBA Finals. The Secret Service set up a hard perimeter around the arena, fans were forced to wait in line for hours to pass through advanced screenings, and public watch parties were forced to relocate away from their usual spaces near the arena.
“This is about an individual engaging in a level of narcissism that really rakes my freakin’ nerves,” Smith said on Monday. “He’s got no business here tonight. It has nothing to do with politics. It was everything to do with the fervor that exists around the New York Knicks and he is disrupting everything the Knicks have been vibing with.”
“I would say the same thing if it were Obama, George W., Clinton — I don’t give a damn [if] we went back to Reagan,” Smith added. “If it causes the Knicks to lose tonight, I’m blaming him. I’m blaming the president of the United States.“
In response to the president questioning his intelligence, Smith said on Tuesday that if the president “wants to talk about IQ, I could say 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,” he added. Smith called out the loss of revenue to locals bars around the arena: “I thought you were about the economy? I thought you were about helping New Yorkers ‘cause you love New York?”
Trump’s response to Smith’s comments was not the first time he’s lashed out at a prominent person of color in American media or politics by questioning their intelligence. Earlier this year, he referred to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the first Black woman to serve as a justice — as the “new low-IQ” person on the court.
The president has used the phrase “low IQ” to describe several lawmakers of color, as well, including Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).
During the 2024 campaign, Trump regularly described Vice President Kamala Harris as a “low-IQ individual,” and, in at least one instance, referred to her as “slow.” He has also leveled the insult at Black reporters and other people of color in his orbit, and figures like New York Attorney General Letitia James.
While Trump has also deployed the insult at white politicians like former President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom, his targets are most often people of color. According to a review of Trump’s Truth Social posts conducted by Mother Jones, the president used the phrase “Low IQ” at least 50 times between 2022 and April of this year. Sixty percent of the uses were directed an Black or brown individuals — and that’s just in writing.
On Monday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told Inside the NBA that Trump was “welcome” at the Garden. “What makes sports so special, especially when there’s so much that divides people, is it’s something that we have in common,” he said. “We should look for those things that we have in common.”
But the first person to try to denigrate anyone who criticizes him as dumb, even as it pertains to the NBA Finals, is the president himself.
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