No doubt you’ve noticed the MAGA regime is infested with incompetent dolts who couldn’t run a lemonade stand – people who are, in the immortal words of Charles Dickens, “dumb as a drum with a hole in it.”

And you’re probably wondering how this could possibly have happened in an allegedly advanced western nation.

In some celestial realm, Alexander Hamilton is wondering as well. In the 76th Federalist Paper, he wrote an American leader would surely be “both ashamed and afraid” to hire “for the most distinguished or lucrative stations” people whose top traits are “insignificance and pliancy,” thus making them “the obsequious instruments” of the leader’s “pleasure.”

Down in lower Manhattan, Hamilton has rolled over in Trinity Churchyard.

But it’s not sufficient to simply point out that 77 million Americans voted willingly for the dumbest white man in the land – someone who, according to right-leaning pundit David Brooks, “personifies stupidity,” someone whose stupidity “is the achievement of a lifetime” – because, sadly in truth, we’ve long been careening toward our current debacle, fueled by the batshit populist belief that ignorance is good and expertise is bad, that anyone who breathes can be an instant expert.

So, to truly understand why we’re sinking ever deeper into the quicksand of stupid, why we’re saddled with umpteen nitwits like Fox News drunk Pete Hegseth, tinfoil-hatted RFK Jr., and ex-wrestling CEO Linda McMahon (the Education secretary who confuses AI with “A-1,” the steak sauce), we need to book a trip down memory lane.

There has always been an anti-intellectual strain in the American mindset, and the scandals of Vietnam and Watergate, which bared so much horrific behavior at the top, have clearly abetted the populist belief that average Joes could run this country better than the fancypants “elites.” Alas, we’ve now taken that impulse to its destructive extreme.  Putting a dingbat like Trump in the White House – twice! – is the apogee of dumbed-down egalitarianism.

But actually, it was George W. Bush who took that ‘tude for a test drive. We tend to forget that. Granted, he looks like Cicero compared to what we’ve got now, but let’s refresh our memories.

Bush tapped someone named Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court, praising her as “the best person I could find.” It turned out that Miers had written a grand total of three legal articles (including a promotional story about bar association seminars), and that her most noteworthy legal achievement was handling paperwork for Bush’s fishing cabin. Bush also promoted a 24-year-old named George Deutsch to a key post in NASA. The kid had no science background and never graduated college, but that didn’t stop him from censoring NASA scientists’ attempts to talk publicly about global warming.

Most infamously, Bush lauded his FEMA director, Michael Brown (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job!”) despite Brown’s incompetence during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. I’m still wondering how the key job of aiding distressed citizens was given to a guy with no on-the-ground experience in emergency management, a guy whose top cred was 12 years at the International Arabian Horse Association.

And when Bush was winding down as a lame duck in 2008, along came Sarah Palin. Best remembered as John McCain’s Hail Mary veep pick, she was somehow deemed qualified to be a heartbeat from the presidency despite being unable to name any newspapers that she read, being allergic to facts (she said Alaska produced “nearly 20 percent” of our domestic energy, but the accurate stat was 3.5), and knowing zip about the world (she didn’t know there were two Koreas, or that England’s queen was just a figurehead). In hindsight, she helped plow the soil for Trump.

And so here we are, saddled with stupid, and we know where stupid can lead. In the words of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The stupid person…is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.” He got that right. Eighty years ago this month, the Nazis stripped him naked and hung him on the gallows.

The best upbeat scenario is that at some point we’ll come to our senses and rediscover a respect for knowledge and expertise. Adam Kinzinger, the ex-congressman and anti-fascist Republican, said the other day, “I feel confident in predicting that history will judge this decade or so as the absolutely stupidest time in American history. Honestly, our kids and grandkids will read about this time and be shocked that adults existed.”

I suppose that depends on who gets to write that history. Will it be with a pen or a crayon?

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]