During his 2016 presidential bid, Donald Trump wielded insulting nicknames to brutal effect. In the primaries, he ran not against Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz, but against “Low Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” and “Lyin’ Ted.” In the general election, he routinely assailed “Crooked Hillary” Clinton, and won. Trump hasn’t stopped with the epithets since taking office—they’re a hallmark of his rhetorical style. Recently, the candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic nomination have given him fresh ammunition. Bernie Sanders is “crazy,” just as he was in 2016. Amy Klobuchar is a “Snowman(woman)!”; Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas.” Joe Biden—whose candidacy has clearly preoccupied Trump—is “sleepy.”

On Friday, Trump stretched the latter adjective. “Looks to me like it’s going to be SleepyCreepy Joe over Crazy Bernie,” Trump tweeted, of the Democratic race. “Everyone else is fading fast!” He wasn’t done there. Later in the day, in an interview with Politico, the president called Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old Democratic candidate (and mayor of South Bend, Indiana), “Alfred E. Neuman,” a reference to the dimpled, gap-toothed kid on the cover of Mad magazine. The quote drove its own mini-news cycle. Bloomberg, CBS News, the New York Post, The Hill and others carried it as a story in its own right. “Who is Alfred E. Neuman?” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked; The Washington Post saw the reference as proof of a presidential “generation gap.” In San Francisco, Politico asked Buttigieg for a response. “I’ll be honest, I had to Google that,” he said. The retort made headlines, as did Mad’s retort to the retort: “Who is Pete Buttigieg?” Whose burn was sickest? Who cares?

ICYMI: Audit suggests Google favors a small number of major outlets



Regrettably, none of this is a laughing matter. In 2017, I wrote for CJR about the dangerous linguistic power of Trump’s nicknames, which recall the age-old storytelling techniques found in myths and fairy tales. The nicknames, I wrote, trade in “strength, moral failure, and cartoonishly rendered virtue,” appealing to our “childlike desire to make an easily digestible morality tale of a complicated world.” The “pejorative adjective and proper noun” structure—see: “Crooked Hillary” or “SleepyCreepy Joe”—is particularly potent. David Beaver, a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that the sentence “Hillary is crooked” goes into our brains through the intellect: it’s for us to weigh whether it’s true or not. The epithet “Crooked Hillary,” by contrast, presupposes the truth of Hillary’s crookedness. “‘Crooked Hillary’ is emotional, it has this visceral way of just grabbing you,” Beaver said.

“Alfred E. Neuman” doesn’t follow this structure, but a similar principle applies. Consciously or not, Trump uses epithets and nicknames to set the narrative around his political opponents, boxing them in with unflattering stereotypes that can be hard to escape. “Low Energy” continues to stick to Jeb Bush years after Trump coined it, as “Lyin’ Ted” does to Cruz. At best, Trump’s nicknames caricature complicated people—on Friday, Trump literally turned Buttigieg into a cartoon of callow goofiness. At worst, they’re lies dressed up as jokes. Either way, Trump “uses these pejorative adjectives in a way which really does overpower the opposition,” Jack Zipes, a fairy tale expert who has taught at the University of Minnesota, told me in 2017. In the process, rival candidates are dehumanized.

Much of the mainstream press is hyper-vigilant about Trump’s lies and misstatements—we are commonly told that they’re an urgent threat to our democracy and civic discourse. It’s odd then, that so many outlets still treat Trump’s nicknames as an amusing distraction, not the subtle, dangerous manipulation of political discourse they actually represent. We don’t just amplify these insults when Trump wields them: we almost invite him to coin them, then dredge them up unprompted in subsequent coverage. We should resist those impulses, or at least be clear-eyed about what Trump is trying to do. “Alfred E. Neuman” might be funny. But let’s not amuse ourselves to death.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.