Gavin Newsom has torn into Donald Trump for suggesting it takes almost superhuman intelligence to operate a basic piece of gardening equipment.
“Farming equipment has gotten too expensive,” the president raged at a televised Cabinet meeting on Monday. “They put these environmental excesses on the equipment, which don’t do a damn thing except make it complicated, make it impractical, and frankly, you really have to be, in many cases, you need about 185 IQ to turn on a lawnmower.”
The California governor spared no time trolling Trump for his comments, posting an iconic 2017 photo of Trump shouting at a young boy mowing the White House lawn with a speech bubble coming from the president’s gaping mouth: “Do you have a 185 IQ?”
Trump has a long-running preoccupation with intelligence-aptitude tests that borders on obsession. He’s repeatedly boasted that his own IQ is “one of the highest,” and blasted his rivals as “low-IQ individuals.”
Newsom’s response, meanwhile, speaks to a broader pattern in the California governor’s social media output in the past few months, when he’s taken to trolling Trump with exactly the kind of viral posts—often featuring ALL CAPS tirades, childish nicknames, and braggadocious claims—that helped win Trump the election last year.
The president’s latest comments on intellectual capacity and garden machinery will have some film buffs recalling the bizarre 1992 sci-fi horror flick The Lawnmower Man.
It is not clear whether Trump himself ever saw the critically panned Brett Leonard movie—which centers on a rogue scientist who begins feeding nootropic drugs to a gardener with learning disabilities, subjecting him to virtual reality computer simulations in order to increase his brain power.
At the outset, using a lawnmower is just about the only task the movie’s initially “low-IQ” protagonist is able to perform successfully. By the end, as a result of the scientist’s experiments, he has become an extremely smart killing machine.
The Daily Beast has approached the White House for comment.
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