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| Who has higher IQ, Donald Trump or Joe Biden? |
The answer, according to President Donald Trump and Vice President Joe Biden, is "I am."
This should raise some red flags regarding both men's qualifications for the White House.
Despite their differences, Trump and Biden have long had a fascination with their own brains. Trump is always bragging about his intelligence, praising his "very good brain" or, as recently as last week, reiterating the subject of the "stable genius."
He brags about knowing more than anyone else about everything from television ratings to renewable energy to the Islamic State. The president is particularly enamored with his own academic credentials, citing his attendance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance as evidence of "super smart stuff."
Meanwhile, Biden has been on a decades-long mission to persuade everyone that he isn't as stupid as some people believe. "I think [policy] issues are merely a vehicle to portray your intellectual capacity to the voters," the then-relatively junior senator admitted in a 1974 Washingtonian profile.
"I used all the issues from busing to the war to the economy, crime, and prison reform to convince the people that I was intelligent." During his first presidential campaign in 1987, Biden unloaded a rant - full of lies, no less - on a voter who he thought was challenging his intelligence:
"I believe I have a significantly higher IQ than you do. I received a full academic scholarship to law school, making me the only full academic scholarship recipient in my class... The international moot court tournament was won by me.
At the end of the year, I was named the department's outstanding student in political science. I finished from undergraduate school with three degrees and 165 credits (I only required 123 credits), and I'd love to sit down and compare my IQ to yours."
More recently, when chastising the president, Biden boasted: "I'm certainly not as intelligent as Trump, the world's smartest guy. However, I have a fairly high IQ."
All of this conversation about their minds isn't helping either of them. To borrow a Margaret Thatcher idiom, being smart is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you're smart, you probably aren't. And flaunting your brilliance all the time simply encourages more schadenfreude over your gaffes, which both Trump and Biden have enough of.
The fact that this obsession with IQ emanates from two septuagenarians who have long reigned as apex beasts in their own professional jungles is particularly concerning.
They've traveled the globe and shaped it. They've had tragic and triumphant personal lives. Instead of bragging about their intelligence, they should brag about their wisdom.
After all, IQ - or raw processing power - and the academic credentials that accompany it are tests for the young and inexperienced. When you can't yet cite a lifetime of real accomplishments, you utilize them to market yourself. IQ scores and academic achievements have short half-lives; if they're still a big part of your personality at 70, something's wrong.
In leadership, wisdom is more important than Mensa membership or alma mater. Remember that our most admired president, Abraham Lincoln, had no formal education and claimed that the job was so tough that it frequently drove him to his knees in prayer - where, it should be added, one's IQ isn't much assistance anyhow.
Perhaps Trump and Biden aren't bragging about their knowledge because there isn't much to brag about. Biden seemed to take a long time to learn from his mistakes. Plagiarism in law school, for example, didn't help him dodge a plagiarism issue on the campaign trail in the late 1980s, or even a hint of one in his present campaign.
Repeated bankruptcies, adulterous affairs, erroneous utterances, and other issues speak for itself in the case of Trump.
Between now and November, Trump and Biden won't be able to catch up on a lifetime of knowledge. They can, however, strive to avoid praising their own IQs. It just highlights their lack of intelligence, which our country sorely needs.