The last time America decided a member of the executive branch was simply too stupid to serve in office was after Vice-President Dan Quayle attended a 1992 spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey and wrongly told a student that he had misspelled ‘potato.’ It was only partially Quayle’s fault though, because the school had misspelled it as “potatoe” on the flash card it provided to him. This time is different. President Trump is blaming his flubs on the teleprompter which was covered in rain and hard to read, and which he claims was malfunctioning. But Trump isn’t claiming that someone loaded the teleprompter with bad information about the storming of airports during the American Revolutionary War. He isn’t saying that anyone told him that the Star-Spangled Banner flew over a Revolutionary War naval battle rather than a battle of the War of 1812.  He just said those things all on his own because he’s an impossible idiot.

Trump has slipped up in making historical references before. He referred to Frederick Douglass during a 2017 Black History Month event as if he were still alive, even though the famed abolitionist died in 1895. He also claimed that President Andrew Jackson was angry about “what was happening” with the Civil War, although Jackson died 16 years before the war began.

Quayle was unlucky. Many of the people who too-smugly mocked him for not being able to spell ‘potato’ would have failed to use the ‘e’ in the pluralized version (‘potatoes’). If the school had given him the correct spelling on the flashcard, the whole incident would not have happened at all. But he was lucky in one respect. Al Gore had not yet made the internet publicly available, so Quayle didn’t have to endure countless mocking memes from ordinary citizens, like this one depicting Washington crossing the terminal to reach the 1776 Battle of Baggage Claim.

Yet, even unburdened by the scourge of social media, Quayle’s potatoe fiasco was so harmful that Newsweek seemed stunned when he wasn’t dropped from the 1992 ticket:

Talk about survivors: Dan Quayle has been rolling, over and over, on the racetrack of politics ever since he bounced off the media guardrail in the first lap of the 1988 Republican convention. His “approval” rating in some polls is lower than ever. Republican insiders and conservative columnists have begged him to quit-and begged George Bush to dump him. Yet here he is, on his way to Houston, alive on the GOP’s Die Hard ticket. How has he endured? From interviews with his top advisers and travels on the campaign trail, NEWSWEEK has pieced together the story of how Quayle, in his guileless way, survived coup plots and his own bumbling…

Above all, the people needed some explanation for why Quayle wasn’t dropped. It was that obvious that he was an anvil around the president’s neck. And it wasn’t because the people thought he was a crook. It was entirely because they thought he was a moron.

This was before George W. Bush asked “is our children learning?” and talked about “working hard to put food on your family.” It was before Tina Fey mocked Sarah Palin about being able to see Russia from her house.  America actually had some standards about what kind of people they expected to see serving in our nation’s highest offices.

The bar had been lowered so far by 2016 that even a mental midget like Donald Trump could pole vault over it with a campaign based on insults and racial prejudice.

But Trump thrived by being the one dishing out the ridicule. A lot of people were highly entertained as he verbally abused everyone in sight. They didn’t care about the hifalutin standards of Ivy League-educated journalists and editorial boards that uniformly found him unfit for office. They didn’t care if he was a sexual predator and they didn’t believe his wealth was built more on inheritance and fraud than hard work and business know-how. He was making fun of the right people, and that was good enough for them.

But this airport thing may have crossed a line. This isn’t a mistake the average citizen looks at and thinks they might make themselves. This doesn’t make them think that Trump is just like them. I mean, basically no one thinks that there airplanes or airports in the 18th-Century during the founding of our country. Trump might be the only person on the planet who thinks that.

It makes people wonder if he’s even from this planet.

This meme is going to have some really staying power. It makes Trump look ridiculous like nothing he has done in the past. It’s going to make a lot of people conclude for the first time that his critics are right and he’s just too much of an idiot to be the president.