Donald Trump has been wrestling with two things over the last few days, and I don’t even know how much anyone could help with either one. The first is relatively existential — his grip on reality. The President seems to have forgotten how recordings work and thus has been ferociously denying that he’s said things that everyone watched him say.
The second is the word “nasty.”
Trump called the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, “nasty” during an interview — it’s this that he is in denial about — and the act of doing so kind of lays out the framework for the administration’s modus operandi when he says something stupid: Get right on board. It was misogyny to call her stupid, stupidity to do it right before he visited the royal family, incompetence to deny having done it when the interview in which he said it was on video, and straight up pathological for him to keep on lying about it on Twitter:
I never called Meghan Markle “nasty.” Made up by the Fake News Media, and they got caught cold! Will @CNN, @nytimes and others apologize? Doubt it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 2, 2019
But the quotation marks there, they bring us to the next stage of nasty. Because at this point, we reckon he’s maybe trolling the world with punctuation and trying to use quotation marks to deny having said things he’s said. Today on the plane ride over he trotted out his new favorite word again, wrapped it in quotes, and threw it at the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, whom he has had a special hate for ever since he found out that London elected a brown person to lead their fair city.
.@SadiqKhan, who by all accounts has done a terrible job as Mayor of London, has been foolishly “nasty” to the visiting President of the United States, by far the most important ally of the United Kingdom. He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me……
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2019
….Kahn reminds me very much of our very dumb and incompetent Mayor of NYC, de Blasio, who has also done a terrible job – only half his height. In any event, I look forward to being a great friend to the United Kingdom, and am looking very much forward to my visit. Landing now!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2019
It would be ironic indeed if the President were acknowledging that the US and UK are primary allies and yet he was calling a member of the royal family and an elected official there names publicly for criticism they did of him in private. Also, the jab at Mayor Khan’s height indicates that Trump is okay with body-shaming, something any potential “friend” he makes in the UK should remember if they ever happen to piss him off.
Trump’s visit to the UK is not starting well, and doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better.
Featured image via screen capture
