Jon Ossoff

The days of Donald Trump bestowing stupid-yet-iconic nicknames on his opponents — like “Low-Energy Jeb,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Liddle Marco” — are long gone. In recent years, he’s come up with only one truly great nickname: “Meatball Ron.” But tragically, Trump was too woke to use it. Instead, we’ve been stuck with boring and confusing insults like “Crazy” Nancy Pelosi, Mitch “Broken Old Crow” McConnell, and Letitia “Peekaboo” James.

Now Trump’s nickname game has hit a new low with his moniker for Georgia senator Jon Ossoff. The president posted this on Truth Social today after learning that the Republican he endorsed in the Senate runoff, Representative Mike Collins, will challenge the incumbent Democrat in November:

It’s obvious what Trump was going for here (hilariously, Merriam-Webster’s online definition for “jerk off” includes a great Stephen Miller insult). But why is there an “s” missing from “Ossoff”? What kind of nickname includes three internal punctuation marks? And worst of all, how exactly are you supposed to say “Os(jerk!)off” out loud?

What’s really wild is that Trump seems to have no awareness that his nickname abilities are slipping. The president’s other jab at Ossoff — “Dumocrat” — is a recent invention, and he’s clearly quite proud of it. Explaining how he came up with the (rather obvious) name has become a regular Trump bit, and in every retelling he asserts that “a lot of people don’t know ‘dumb’ has a ‘b’ in it”:

Trump has plenty of time to come up with some other nasty name for Ossoff. The Georgia Senate race is months away, and there’s chatter about the Democrat running for president in 2028. But if Trump’s unwarranted confidence in his other dumb nicknames is any indication, Republicans need to start figuring out how they’re going to verbally taunt “Os(jerk!)off” during a campaign rally.