Time magazine columnist Joe Klein said Wednesday morning that Republican front-runner Donald Trump has a “feral” “lizard brain,” which earned him a fight with the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
The term “lizard brain” was popularized in 2010 by American entrepreneur Seth Godin, who wrote that despite years of evolution, humans have held on to the part of the brain that remembers what is necessary to blend in and survive.
For Klein, Trump is not only an advanced “lizard brain,” but the GOP presidential candidate is also dangerously ignorant and “feral.” His remarks came after host Joe Scarborough gushed about how Trump refuses to pick a side in the ongoing dispute between Israel and Palestine.
“[The] reason why he’s not going to pick a side, and the reason why he doesn’t get specific on a lot of stuff, is that he doesn’t know anything,” said Klein.
Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski took exception to this remark, and noted that media said the same thing about Ronald Reagan when he ran for president in 1980.
“I’m making the point [media has] been dead wrong about Trump for six to nine months,” Scarborough said. “We have been skewered because we have simply said he’s not an idiot that is going to lose this race.”
“He has a very, very highly developed lizard brain,” Klein responded to laughs. “He has a feral intelligence. He reminds me of the [Roman] Emperor Caligula, who got his greatest pleasure from destroying his opponents and humiliating them, and [Trump] is brilliant at that. But he doesn’t know anything about policy, Joe.”
Later in the program, long after Klein had said his piece about Trump, Scarborough and Brzezinski dug through the Time columnist’s past writings to find that he claimed in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Reagan had a subpar intelligence.
“So my argument has long been that the same things a lot of people are saying about Donald Trump, they said about Ronald Reagan. Joe Klein denied that,” Scarborough said. “In February of 1980, exactly this time in the 1980 presidential cycle, a young contributing writer to New York magazine by the name of – wait, wait – Joe Klein wrote this about – wait, wait – Ronald Reagan!”
“He says, ‘he delivers the homilies well … The speech works but it also works against him, emphasizing the pre-packaged torpid nature of his candidacy … and his modest intellectual capacity,'” he continued, quoting from old columns penned by Klein. “‘His extremism was simpleminded rather than mean spirited.”
“This is the second person that [Klein] has called dumb,” Scarborough concluded.
Prior to Reagan’s first term as president, he served as California’s governor from 1967 to 1975, successfully tackling welfare reform and turning the Golden State’s $194 million budget deficit into a $554 million surplus.
Prior to Trump’s campaign launch in June 2015, he starred in a reality TV show where he and his children fired D-list celebrities. His corporations have also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy four times, and his name is attached to at least a dozen failed commercial ventures, including Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump Mortgage and Trump University.
