“First Take” host Stephen A. Smith slammed President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning after Trump told reporters on Monday night that Smith wouldn’t be a good fit to run for president because “you need a high IQ.”

The ESPN host opened the episode standing in front of a projected American flag with “Hail to the Chief” playing in the background.

“He wants to sit up there and talk about my low IQ?” Smith said. “I could put my IQ against yours. I got something even better — I could ask you why you’ve been running from me for the past year since I asked you to talk to me. I could ask you to debate me since you think you’re that dude. We could go a myriad of ways.”

Trump was about to board Air Force One on Monday night when a reporter asked how he felt about Smith — “who has talked about running for president” — blaming him for the New York Knicks’ loss in Game 3 of the NBA Finals.

“I think he’s a nice guy, but you need a certain aptitude to run for president,” Trump said. “You need a high IQ. I’m not sure that Stephen has that. I don’t think he does, actually.”

Trump’s “low IQ” comment against Smith has racist implications and is referred to as a “racial dog whistle” by linguists and political experts, said Dr. Karrin Anderson, a communications studies professor at Colorado State University.

“What distinguishes a dog whistle from just an insult is it is designed to sound innocuous,” Anderson, who teaches courses in rhetoric, political communication, and gender and communication, told HuffPost. “It is meant to be deniable. The virtue, the rhetorical appeal of a dog whistle, is you can deny that it functions in the way that it is actually designed to function.”

It’s a term that white supremacists have historically used against people of color, and it’s not the first time the president has publicly used it. Last month, he called House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) a “thug” and a “low IQ” person on Truth Social. In April, he called Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson the “new low-IQ person on the court.” During the 2024 Presidential election, Trump repeatedly described former Vice President Kamala Harris as a “low-IQ individual.”

The president has also made the “low IQ” comment about Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) in at least eight separate Truth Social Posts, as well as about Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, to name a few more. Even before his first term, in 2011, Trump publicly questioned how former President Barack Obama had earned his degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School because, Trump claimed, Obama had been a “terrible student.”

“He applies it indiscriminately to Black people in different walks of life and professions,” Anderson said. “That’s where it reveals that it is a racist dog whistle because it doesn’t relate to anything else.”

When reached for comment, the White House said to refer to the president’s comments outside Air Force One last night. ESPN and Smith’s rep did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment before publishing.

There is a long history in the U.S. of this “low IQ” dog whistle, Anderson said.

“During the colonial era, white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of color, and thus, divinely appointed for leadership,” she said.

But this language of “low IQ” was “quickly weaponized,” Megan Figueroa, a research scientist at the University of Arizona’s psychology department, told HuffPost. Figueroa also co-hosts the “Vocal Fries” podcast, which focuses on linguistic discrimination.

“IQ was used to justify heinous behavior like racial segregation and forced sterilizations,” Figueroa said.

That thinking was amplified in the late 1990s by a popular book titled “The Bell Curve,” which falsely claimed that IQ differences between racial groups were biological. Phrenology — another form of race science that claimed skull shapes determined intelligence — has also been completely discredited by the scientific community because of how often it was used to uphold scientific racism and gender stereotypes throughout the U.S. and Europe.

“The proliferation of this kind of racist pseudoscience gave rise to ‘low IQ’ as a thinly, thinly veiled way to be racist,” Figueroa said.

But while phrenology and “The Bell Curve” were dismissed as pseudoscience, the ideas are still “popular in certain conservative circles,” Anderson said.

“Everybody thought we sort of had moved past believing that way,” Anderson said. “[But] 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.”

Trump has been using this dog whistle frequently. Between January 20, 2025, and April 25, 2026, Trump posted “low IQ,” or a variation of the phrase, 24 times, according to a study by Truthout, a nonprofit news organization. Eight out of every 10 posts were directed at Black or brown people. In the first 10 months of his second term, Trump did not refer to any white person as someone with “low IQ.”

In an April 16 post — which was targeting Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent and Megyn Kelly, along with Candace Owens — Trump wrote, “You’re born that way, LOW IQ, and there’s not a damn thing they’re going to be able to do about it!”

“It is designed to signal to a specific audience that a speaker shares their ideology or belief systems,” Anderson said. “[Trump] uses it to refer to Black people and, predominantly but not exclusively, Black women. I think in his mind, because it doesn’t explicitly refer to race, he feels that it is easy to deny that it’s a racist label.”

By repeating the phrase openly, the practice further popularizes the concept. As Harris once put it, Trump’s language seems to have become less a dog whistle and more a bullhorn.

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