HuffPost has repeatedly exposed dangerous patterns in President Donald Trump's veiled rhetoric, and a recent incident didn't just make headlines — it echoed through Capitol Hill when Rep. Al Green took our reporting directly to the House floor to call out Trump's racist weaponization of language.
After ESPN's Stephen A. Smith predicted the New York Knicks would lose Game 3 of the NBA Finals if Donald Trump showed up at Madison Square Garden — and they did — the president's response was as revealing as it was predictable.
"You need a certain aptitude to run for president," Trump told reporters outside Air Force One. "You need a high IQ. I'm not sure that Stephen has that. I don't think he does, actually."
We've noticed this pattern before and had the research to back it up. Between January 2025 and April 2026, Trump used the phrase "low IQ" or a variation of it 24 times on Truth Social. Eight out of every 10 of those posts were directed at Black or brown people. In the first 10 months of his second term, he did not call a single white person "low IQ."
That is not a coincidence. It is a disturbing, calculated trend. When Green called out HuffPost's work on the House floor Thursday, he read passages from our work that wave several red flags.
"I must commend miss Katie Mather for the outstanding job she has done with this article," Green started. "I'd like to read some excerpts from this because I think it would give us an opportunity to understand how the Trump presidency has not only impacted what he does, but also some other aspects of society."
And that's precisely what HuffPost Life's mission is — to look deeper at our (and our leaders') everyday actions and statements, and examine the deeper meaning and potential impact behind them.
The targets of Trump's attacks tell the whole story: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the "new low-IQ person on the court." House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whom Trump called both a "thug" and a "low IQ" person in the same Truth Social post. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whom Trump attacked with the same slur in at least eight separate posts. Kamala Harris, whom Trump repeatedly dismissed as a "low-IQ individual" throughout the 2024 presidential race. And now Stephen A. Smith.
Our reporting didn't stop at the pattern. It went into the history. Linguists explained to HuffPost how "IQ was used to justify heinous behavior like racial segregation and forced sterilizations." Experts traced how a pseudoscience rooted in white supremacy laid the groundwork for a slur that now flows freely from the Oval Office. "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," Dr. Karrin Anderson, a communications studies professor at Colorado State University, told HuffPost.
This is the tangible impact of independent journalism. When lawmakers like Rep. Green read our investigations aloud on the House floor, it proves that real reporting doesn't just shadow the news cycle — it makes the congressional record.
HuffPost believes journalism should hold power to account, not whisper around it. Support our work by joining HuffPost's membership program today. Your support funds the reporting that names what others won't and takes it all the way to Capitol Hill.
