‘Somehow found her way to the bench’: Trump insults Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as ‘low IQ’

“There is a specific type of racism and white supremacy that attacks Black minds,” Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross tells theGrio.

President Donald Trump personally attacked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a Truth Social tirade, calling the double Harvard-educated, first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court “low IQ.”

In a Wednesday morning post bemoaning the Supreme Court’s February ruling against his global tariffs that collected more than $166 billion from importers and drove up consumer prices, Trump complained that the conservative majority—three of whom were appointed by him—do not “stick together” like the three liberal justices, including Jackson and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Trump wrote of Jackson: “They ALWAYS vote as a group, or BLOCK, even that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!).”

The president’s insult of Jackson isn’t unfamiliar; he’s repeatedly used the “low IQ” term to attack his perceived political enemies, many of whom have been Black women, including U.S. Reps. Jasmine Crockett, Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Jackson, who earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1992 and Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1996, worked as a federal public defender from 2005-2007, a U.S. district judge from 2013-2021, and a U.S. Court of Appeals judge from 2021 until she was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Joe Biden in 2022.

While Trump’s “low IQ” insult has also been used against non-Black individuals like former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s particularly offensive when used against Black Americans.

“It means something different in the Black community, because there is a specific type of racism and white supremacy that attacks Black minds,” says Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross.

Dating back to the U.S. enslavement of Black people in the 1800s, Cross explained, “Government institutions at the time used faulty science to say that Black people had smaller brains, so their capacity wasn’t strong enough for them to work in any other way than using their hands and breaking their backs.”

Trump’s attack on Jackson comes a week after the Supreme Court justice rebuked the court’s conservative majority for its many rulings in favor of the president’s emergency order requests. She argued that the rulings allowed the president to carry out executive actions that were likely illegal. Justice Jackson has also emerged as a forceful critic of the Trump administration, often making headlines for her various dissents.

“The president of the United States, although he may be…harmed in an abstract way by not doing what he wants to do, he certainly isn’t harmed if what he wants to do is illegal, right? He doesn’t have the ability to do something unlawful. And the point of the merits proceeding is to determine whether the thing he wants to do is unlawful,” Jackson said recently during a lecture at Yale Law School.

“She’s not afraid to stand up to this president, and that’s something that he is always ready to shoot fire from; when somebody stands up to him, particularly in the legal space,” Cross tells theGrio. “The only place that has been able to chase down Donald Trump and win has been when he is threatened by the courts.”

The Democratic strategist added, “He cannot take a rebuke, but he definitely can’t take a rebuke from Black women. There isn’t a singular identity in America that Donald Trump hates more than Black women.”

Cross says it’s also not a coincidence that Trump attacks the intelligence of Black women—and other prominent Black figures like former U.S. President Barack Obama—at a time when funding and resources, like education, are plaguing Black communities, and Black unemployment and racial wealth disparities are rising.

“This is also the guy who is pushing an anti-DEI narrative to strip education from Black people, to limit their access to higher education, to limit their access to federal student loans that would allow them to go to grad school, particularly those from low-income communities,” she explains. “This is the guy who says that once you’ve achieved something as a Black person, it’s because of DEI, not because of your intellectual capacity, not because of your skill set, not because you worked hard. All of that is thrown aside because you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”