Ken's Reviews > Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

When you think of the term “well-researched history,” you seldom also think of the term “at times hilarious.” Dive into this gem and all that will change.

With 240 reference notes and a 12-page index, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber shows academic rigor while at the same time keeping the reader entertained. To accomplish this, Andy Borowitz will typically provide facts and/or an anecdote and crown it with an aside, a zinger, or a sarcastic note that will crack you up.

Structurally, the book is divided into three stages as it tracks how we got to the scary place we find ourselves today. The stages are Ridicule, Acceptance, and Celebration. Historically, then, we go from the days where handlers worked hard to shield their ignorant charges from ridicule when said charges opened their mouths and revealed… not much furniture “upstairs.” This stage focuses on Ronald Reagan of Bedtime for Bonzo fame and Dan Quayle of “potatoe” fame.

From there we move to the Bushes, primarily G.W. (a.k.a. “Dubya”), who dragged ignorance into a heretofore unknown light – acceptance. He and his handlers did this by stressing what a regular guy he was (even though he was filthy rich), how only eggheads know a lot of stuff, anyway, and how not reading much (or caring much for books and people who read them) puts you in the same category as many Americans.

We also learn here that many voters vote for the person they’d “most like to have a beer with,” as if that is the crowning qualifier for the presidency. Acceptance is helped, too, if you constantly paint your opponent (in Dubya’s case, Al Gore) as a hopeless dweeb and wonk completely out of tune with most regular folk, who would put Gore’s type (as caricatured by Bush & Friends) in the category of weird Jeopardy! contestants.

Finally, we get Celebration, where idiocy is not only RIDICULE-FREE and ACCEPTED, but reveled in. Need I tell you where the history has brought us by this point in the book? I need not, because he just declared he wants to occupy the White House (for good this time, with the right sycophants and handpicked partisan judges) once more.

To give you a taste of Borowitz’s style, here is a bit focusing on Tony Schwartz, the “ghostwriter of [Trump’s] image-forging 1987 best seller, Trump: The Art of the Deal":

Schwartz was interviewed by Jane Mayer, a reporter for The New Yorker. In her piece based on that discussion, she wrote, “During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.” There is, however, one book reportedly in his possession, according to his ex-wife Ivana: he kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches, titled My New Order at his bedside. His own oratory suggests that he might have dipped into that one from time to time.

“Trump’s aversion to reading the work of non-Third Reich authors posed a challenge to those at the White House charged with keeping him semi-informed. According to an email attributed to his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, ‘It’s worse than you can imagine… Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. To brief a man with such a severe case of book hesitancy, his aides resorted to a throwback from the Reagan era, putting on shows featuring graphs, maps, photos, and other word-free visual aids. After noticing that Trump was more likely to read material that mentioned his name, National Security Council staffers tried to trick him into finishing memos by crowbarring ‘Trump’ into as many paragraphs as possible.”

Toward the end of the book, Borowitz turns his attention to the Republicans in Congress who enabled Trump (and still do):

“In their earnest effort to flood the zone with shit, some Trump acolytes in Congress wound up shitting the bed. Exhibit A was Mary Miller, a freshman congresswoman from Illinois, who, in remarks at a pro-Trump rally in Washington on the eve of the Capitol insurrection, made an ill-advised reference to the president’s favorite bedtime author. ‘Hitler was right on one thing,’ she declared. ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’ Call it a rookie mistake, but someone should have told Miller that, when you start a sentence with ‘Hitler was right,’ it’s almost impossible to stick the landing. Since all she was trying to say was that children are the future, it’s baffling that she didn’t quote the far less genocidal Whitney Houston. In fairness, Miller was on the same page as her role model—Trump, that is, not the Führer—who once reportedly told his chief of staff John Kelly, ‘Hitler did a lot of good things.’ Her only mistake was saying in public what Trump had said in private. Knowing when and when not to praise Hitler can be tricky.”

In the final chapter, “Conclusion: Democracy’s Braking System,” Borowitz appeals to Americans who are upset with living so close to the precipice. He begs that we not just feel good about ourselves by staying informed and reading books like his and newspapers that can be trusted thanks to journalistic ethics. Giving money to campaigns is a cop-out, too (and he blames himself as much as the next guy). The true secret is getting involved on a grass roots level, and he provides plenty of examples on how to do that.

All in all, one of the most edifying and amusing books on the American political scene I’ve yet to read. Poor JFK, author (asterisk for “with the help of ghostwriter” inserted here) of Profiles in Courage. He must be turning in his eternally-lit grave these days. Reading Profiles in Ignorance might just help us turn the tide and give Pres. Kennedy some rest, but trust me when I say, it won’t be easy and it’s going to require real work.