Opinion | The G.O.P.’s Problem With the Elite Begins With Its Own

Donald Trump loves to show off how smart he is. “I’m, like, a smart person,” he boasted on one occasion. “I went to an Ivy League college, I was a nice student,” he said on another. “I’m a very intelligent person.” And perhaps most memorably, “I’m a very stable genius.”

But the dopey language he chooses, along with his disheveled, unpresidented grammar — both intentional and inadvertent — belie those assertions. It’s impossible to forget that this is the same guy who spells little “liddle’,” capitalizes at random and blunders out the occasional “covfefe.”

Trump is shrewd enough to know that Americans don’t like a guy who acts smart. So if his fumbles are strategic, it’s not entirely dumb. On the left, people think emphasizing intellect and elite schools betrays unfair advantage in a multiple-intelligences, equitable-outcome world. On the right, your average MAGA Joe bristles at anyone who comes across as a coastal elite or too smart for his own good.

In its recent populist incarnation, Republicans downplay any whiff of intellectualism by avoiding big words in favor of Kid Rock fandom and trucker hat slogans. In MAGA world, glorified ignorance actually serves as a qualification for higher office (see: Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene), empowering more effective rage against “the liberal elite” and “the ruling class.”

This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.

Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.”