Donald Trump is very proud of his talent for nicknames. In a recent interview in New Hampshire he explained, “I do a lot of names for people, some people say I’m very good at that.”
I suppose that’s true. His followers do seem to love it when he bestows some juvenile nickname on one of his rivals. This seems to be the extent of his “branding” expertise which makes some sense since his success at that was due to him slapping his own name on everything in sight, from meat to ties to con games and buildings. Put a name on it and it sticks, I guess.
When he first ran for office his penchant for silly nicknames was jarring but it’s so common now that nobody much notices the fact that he really seems to have lost his touch since the halcyon days of “Li’l Marco” “Pocohontas” and “Lyin’ Ted.” His nickname for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was “Ron DeSanctimonious” or sometimes “Ron DeSanctus” neither of which made much sense. I’m not sure he even knew what the words meant. Calling former cabinet member Elaine Chow “Coco” and New York Attorney General Tish James “Peekaboo” was weird. And let’s face facts. Recycling “Crooked Hillary” to “Crooked Joe” was just pathetic. This is the best the “master brander” can do these days?
But we must give credit where credit is due. He has finally come up with a nickname that is so outrageous that it will go down in political history as his piece de resistance: he’s now calling himself “Honest Don.” I’m not kidding:
The man who is going to go down in history as the president who incited an insurrection with something widely known as The Big Lie is now calling himself “Honest Don.” You couldn’t make this up.
This is the man the Washington Post tracked making 30,573 false or misleading claims over the 4 years he was in office. And needless to say he’s made thousands more since then. He lies as easily as he breathes about everything whether it’s the size of his apartment (for which, among other lies, he was just found guilty of fraud to the tune of almost half a billion dollars) or that his presidency was the most successful in world history (never mind the hundreds of thousands of Americans dead from the pandemic by the time he left office.)
And then there are all the women who say that “Honest Don” sexually assaulted them, including E. Jean Carroll whom he continues to defame on the campaign trail even though his lies about her have cost him almost a hundred million dollars and likely more because just can’t stop doing it. There is nothing he won’t lie about and there is just too much evidence of it to believe that his ardent followers don’t see any of it. They just don’t care.
“Honest Don” also happens to be under 91 felony indictments ranging from federal criminal charges for willful retention of national defense documents under the espionage act and conspiracy to defraud the United States to state charges for falsifying business records and solicitation of violation of oath by public officer. For such an honest guy he sure seems to have gotten himself into a whole lot of trouble with the law.
Then there’s all that money he took in during his years as president with foreign governments and others seeking access and currying favor by spending millions at his hotels and golf resorts and buying memberships in his Florida social club Mar-a-Lago, from which he profited handsomely. We know he lied about his lack of involvement in the businesses because at one point he even announced that the government was going to host the G7 at his Doral golf resort, a very lucrative contract. He was forced to back off that one because of an outcry from the press and the meeting was canceled due to the pandemic anyway but throughout his term he spent massive amounts of time at his resorts in Florida, New Jersey and around the world turning each trip into a promotional opportunity.
Now we’re entering a new phase in the dishonesty and corruption of “Honest Don.” He is in serious need of money right now because his legal fees are mounting exponentially, he’s got massive judgments in the civil cases he has to post bond for, his company is no longer doing new deals and who knows how many big loans are coming due? There’s a limit to how much he will be able to milk from his campaign coffers because he has to spend enough of it to mount a real run for the office to keep himself out of court and out of jail.
He may have been counting on the public offering of his social media platform Truth Social to provide a big cash injection now that it’s cleared a number of hurdles but that’s up in the air since he’s been sued by the two co-founders who built it but were cut out of the deal. (Honest Don” often doesn’t pay people who do work for him, always claiming that it wasn’t up to his standards. He’s stiffed hundreds of businesses over the years.) There is also mounting evidence that he may be changing his policies to help out donors, such as his abrupt about face on banning TikTok after meeting with a deep pocketed investor.
And then there’s the total banana republic move to take over the Republican National Committee by installing his daughter-in-law and a personal toadie to run the place and instituting a massive purge of employees in order to make room for Trump loyalists after strong-arming the board into allowing the organization to start picking up his legal bills. “Honest Don” is doing to the RNC what he plans to do to the country.
After all that what’s left for “Honest Don” to lie about you ask? Well, get ready. After the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee played a compilation of Trump’s various gaffes and gitches to push back on the claims in Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s scurrilous attacks on Joe Biden’s mental competence, get a load of what Trump posted on Truth Social:
I’m just surprised he didn’t think of that one earlier. Just as he says that any election he didn’t win is rigged, I think we can expect Trump to say going forward that any footage of him looking or sounding cognitively challenged is actually AI. “Honest Don” never loses and never makes a mistake.