The Threat of a Woman Laughing, or Laffin’
by Maria Bustillos
Donald Trump has shown a gruesome talent for crafting cruel, misspelled, and weirdly punctuated messages that stick in your mind for years, written in English that reads like an epileptic seizure. In particular, the nicknames he’s invented for his many enemies and rivals are persistently unpleasant—hard to forget, though you’d like to—like the taste of a moldy blueberry, or that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise drinks rotten milk by mistake.
Dozens of these nicknames are collected at Wikipedia. “Sleepy Joe” Biden and “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz; “Little Marco” Rubio, “Crazy Mika” Brzezinski and “Psycho Joe” Scarborough and, most irritatingly, “Liddle’ Adam Schiff,” its random apostrophe carefully preserved and, in its heyday, bristling from every newspaper like a mental thorn.
So far, though, Trump’s nickname for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is just “Laffin’ Kamala,” which on the face of it is an innocuous enough name, practically friendly, even, lacking in the signature nastiness. Why should a person not be laffin’ or even Laffin’? Is this a sign of Trump’s declining skill as a fabricator of insults?
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!