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Trump Should Double Down on His Botched Jon Ossoff Nickname
Everyone knows that Donald Trump’s nickname game is total trash now. (See: Mitch “Broken Old Crow” McConnell and Letitia “Peekaboo” James). Theoretically, this shouldn’t bother me, as I’m pretty sure I’m one of the people he’d dubbed “the enemy of the people.” And he never takes my advice when he’s workshopping insults, which is why he spent the 2024 GOP primary attacking “Ron DeSanctimonious” instead of “Meatball Ron.”
Nevertheless, as a connoisseur of idiotic Trumpian nicknames I feel compelled to point out that he’s passing up a good opportunity to make his failed attempts to insult Senator Jon Ossoff slightly less embarrassing.
During a rally in Marietta, Georgia on Wednesday night, the president mocked the Democratic Georgia senator by saying, “He reminds me of Pinky Herman. Did you ever see Pinky Herman?”
Like many Trump rally riffs this was probably incomprehensible to people who don’t closely monitor his unhinged Truth Social ravings. For several weeks, Trump has been trying to insult Ossoff by claiming he looks like Pee-wee Herman:
The MAGA rally crowd chuckled at “Pinky Herman,” maybe because they got that Trump was making a botched reference to the ‘80s comedic character created by the late Paul Reubens, or possibly because they innately understood that the president was looking for a laugh. Either way, Trump confirmed that he’d misspoken later in the speech when he correctly named “Pee-wee Herman” while attacking Ossoff.
This was actually the wrong move. All Trump did was invite “Grandpa can’t remember his own dumb nickname” jokes. He should have doubled down on “Pinky,” tying it into his effort to brand all Democrats “communists.” Trump could claim he was using a clever mash-up of “pinko commie” and “Pee-Wee Herman.”
To be clear, this is not actually clever, or a very good insult. It requires people to know A) who Pee-Wee Herman is, B) that Trump calls all Democrats communists, and C) that “pinko” is an outdated pejorative term for people on the left. But it’s still a lot better than his previous Ossoff nickname attempt:
“Pinky Herman” is no “Low-Energy Jeb” or “Lyin’ Ted.” But it still beats “Os(jerk!)off,” as it isn’t crude, misspelled, unpronounceable, or filled with punctuation marks.