Is Trump a Neanderthal?

It may be a politically incorrect to say it, but desperate times require words commensurate with the existential threat of Donald Trump in his 80^th day in office.

English is the only language that turned Neanderthals, the long extinct Paleolithic hominin, into an insult and epithet. Since the naming of “Neanderthal Man” after the discovery of a skull cap with protruding brow ridges in Prussia in 1856, the species (or subspecies) has had a bad rap as a foil and lesser doppelganger of Homo sapiens. But it was only in the 1920s that their name became synonymous with archaic, regressive ideas and behaviors. Although the Neanderthal metaphor was widely used to described sports figures (especially boxers), outdated technology, and forms of masculinity threatened by waves of feminist progress, it was especially relevant to politics. Hitler was a Neanderthal, and so was Stalin (recall Arthur Koestler’s denunciation of the “Neanderthal mind.”) Closer to home, after World War II, a string of reactionary, often racists Republican politicians, from Theodore Bilbo to Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon, earned the epithet that appeared widely and unselfconsciously in newspaper reporting and commentary. It bothered no one to make use of one kind of human to slander another, so long as they were extinct; the progressive Left widely adopted the other N-word to criticize their foes and their ideas, obstacles to equality, liberty, and justice.

Already in 1940, the indefatigable ant-racist anthropologist Ashley Montague denounced the metaphoric use of Neanderthals, and since then, a campaign to rehabilitate them has waxed and waned. By the 1980s, the political insult was in decline when two causes, feminism and environmentalism, gave it new life. By the early twenty-first century, archaeological findings filled the newspapers with claims that “Neanderthals weren’t so dumb” and “Neanderthals were humans, too.” The mapping of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, coupled with the growth of personal DNA ancestry tests, restored Neanderthals to a certain humanity, revealing that we have all have inherited, even African populations, modest amounts of their DNA through millennia of interbreeding. By 2016, in an extension of politically correct politics to the Stone Age, the metaphor had virtually disappeared, at least in print.

Then came Trump, who single handedly restored the use of the insult, and even assured its expansion into languages where “Neanderthal” had hitherto only named an extinct human species. Trump’s sexual politics, revealed in the October 2016 Access Hollywood tape, justified the epithet, but it was not his Neanderthalic remarks about women alone. In his first term, Trump showed his cards as a paleoconservative, or at least a fellow traveler, with his atavistic MAGA nationalism and global isolationism, his faux-Christian ethics, his anti-abortion and LGBTQ proclivities, and his racism. It was these, coupled with his evident stupidity and cluelessness, that earned him the epithet of “Neanderthal” in newspapers from South Africa to Armenia. In the United States, the insult was again receding when, during Covid, Joe Biden (who came of political age when the Neanderthal epithet was common usage) accused Governor Greg Abbot in March 2021 of “Neanderthal thinking” in dropping the mask mandate in Texas. Republicans rose to the defense of the extinct hominin as part of the culture wars. It was Neanderthal’s swan song, at least in print, since major news outlets then distanced themselves from the term, worried about not offending anyone, dead or alive – although the insult continues to resonate on social media platforms.

Here’s a modest proposal: that those among us who oppose Trump, and I suspect we will become a larger and larger group, make use of a word rich in historical and symbolic resonance for the Left. There are few words so evocative of Trump’s stupidity and incompetence, of his war on knowledge institutions from public libraries to museums and research universities, of his racist and sexist attack on DEI, and now of his ignorant engendering of a global economic catastrophe. Trump is truly a Neanderthal, looking backward to a long extinct world of mercantilist protectionism, of white supremacy, and male dominance, while we have all evolved. I know it’s not fair to Neanderthals, but by calling Trump one, we only insult ourselves, since we’re all a little bit Neanderthal – especially those who voted to put him back in office.