For a man whose primary business his entire life has been building his name, then selling it like a commodity, there’s something particularly satisfying about watching Donald Trump be called by everything but his proper name — nearly as satisfying as watching videos of his name being pried off the sides of buildings around the world.
Indeed, at the outset of the Trump presidency in the social media news world, it was almost a contest to see who could come up with the cleverest names for Trump, rather than calling him “the President” (which I will admit is still difficult, even for me). We saw endless variations on the color of his awful spray tan — Orange Oligarch, The Great Trumpkin — enough to fill pages. There were the jabs at his comparatively small hands — Donnie Dainty Digits was perhaps my favorite that I ever used personally.
Sorry, I think I was getting a little wistful for a time when we had no idea just how deep Trump’s corruption ran. Let’s get back on track.
Donald Trump has a new name now, and it wasn’t given as a term of endearment. There’s nothing funny about it, and it doesn’t crack on his appearance in any way. In fact, we sort of used “nickname” in the title of this piece in hopes that it might actually become a nickname, rather than what he’s called for legal reasons in Robert Mueller’s court filings about Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
In those pages, Trump has been reduced from a purveyor of gold and steaks and vodka and ties and golf outings to simply “Individual 1.”
And in the latest turn of events, Mueller has not necessarily shown his cards, but at least let us know he’s holding aces. The avenues now being pursued are not simply financial or transactional, but political: The special counsel is probing for illegal and unethical political activity by Trump, including what Cohen himself has gone above and beyond the court filings to make clear — that then-candidate Trump was personally involved in essentially every aspect of the operation that included Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, Don Jr, Paul Manafort, WikiLeaks, and any number of other players during the campaign for the presidency.
So, Individual 1, do let us know how you like the new name. It wouldn’t look as good on the cover of a video game — “Individual 1’s Real Estate Tycoon” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But it matches how we’ve come to feel, and who knows, it could be prescient: I’ll bet your inmate number ends up having a 1 in it somewhere.
Featured image via screen capture
