The Republican Party’s Elite Conundrum
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.
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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.”
But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.
“I viewed having earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School to be political scarlet letters as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” DeSantis wrote in “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”
His Ivy League brethren, Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), take similar pains to wash off the taint of East Coast academia with good-ol’-boy cred.
This is in sharp contrast to the intellectual pretensions of earlier Republican leaders, who would highlight, say, the “historian” Newt Gingrich’s Ph.D.
The latest standard-bearer for regular-folk Republicans is a down-home J.D., now JD — no periods, dude — who went to Yale Law School only with the help of student loans and side jobs. What’s more, JD Vance first got a humbler degree at Ohio State through the G.I. Bill. At the Republican National Convention, Yale barely came up.
And in one of her very first moves as an aspiring second lady, Usha Vance, who attended Yale as both an undergrad and a law student, made clear she would like to be referred to as Mrs. Vance, rather than Ms. The implication being: dutiful wife first, fancy Ivy League lawyer second.
Gone is the bushy-tailed Vance who wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” “The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something 13-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous.” The up-and-comer who, in thrall of Yale’s “aura,” confessed that he “wanted to go to Yale more than any other school.”
The Vance who emerged as a MAGA politician is one who, after reaping the benefits and connections of an elite graduate education, turned around and gave a speech in 2021 called “The Universities Are the Enemy.”
“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college, to get brainwashed?” he asked the crowd, going on to quote Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.” For Vance, the biggest takeaway from his Ivy League education is the monumental chip on his shoulder.
In politics as in life, brains aren’t everything. Politicians have long achieved high office based on ambition, hubris, cunning and a certain degree of ruthlessness more so than on account of their intellect. Nor does an Ivy League degree equate with excellence.
But it’s nonetheless dispiriting to see a major political party give lowbrow boors pride of place over the high-minded. It also puts Republicans in an awkward position vis-à-vis their new national opponent. Should Republicans frame Kamala Harris as some kind of lightweight bungling her words and laughing her way weirdly to the Oval Office, it risks not only playing into racist and sexist stereotypes, it will also further cement the flagrant hypocrisy of their own party.
After all, the Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.
Pamela Paul is an Opinion columnist at The Times, writing about culture, politics, ideas and the way we live now.
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