Trump plumbs new depths in Clinton bashing
Republican front-runner mocks her bathroom break, uses vulgar Yiddish word
WASHINGTON— The speech was already vulgar before Donald Trump got around to the Yiddish word for penis.
Hillary Clinton was late returning from a bathroom break during the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday. Trump, the Republican front-runner, claimed on Facebook that this was a sign of a serious character flaw.
Par for the course, this election. Then, at a rally in Michigan on Monday, Trump revealed his real complaint. Clinton had used the toilet. “I know where she went. It’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said. “No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting.”
That turned out to be only the second-crudest moment of the night. Soon after, Trump discussed Clinton’s failed 2008 campaign against Barack Obama.
“She was favoured to win, and she got schlonged,” he said, turning the vulgar Yiddish noun into a vulgar verb. “She lost.”
Unabashed sexism. Not a hint of a backlash from the Republican grassroots.
There was a time, way back in the summer, when Trump’s outrages would produce a round of maybe-he-finally-went-too-far wishful thinking from the party establishment. No longer. To Trump’s admirers, it is now clear, his disregard for the rules of campaign rhetoric is more evidence of his independence from a failed political system.
His offensiveness doesn’t detract from his appeal. It is his appeal.
“There is a defiance in the language which is part of his shtick,” said Allan Louden, a Wake Forest University professor who teaches political communication. “Less formal language signals one is an ‘outsider’ from the ones cussed out, an attribute golden in this election cycle.”
These are not spontaneous outbursts. Trump, by all indications, is making a conscious effort to add profanity to his speeches.
He promises to “bomb the s---” out of the Islamic State. He calls criticism “bulls---.” Would he bring back waterboarding? You can “bet your ass-end” he would.
All of the swearing serves to reinforce his brand: politically incorrect straight shooter. In a September poll, 62 per cent of Republicans said Trump “tells it like it is.” By November, even Rand Paul and Jeb Bush were using mild obscenities.
“It has the same appeal that a lot of the other things that he does has, which is it makes it seem like he’s unstudied, he’s unprepared, he’s just telling you what he really thinks. Which people seem to respond to,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M University historian of U.S. political discourse.
Trump’s potty mouth is not without risk: he already has a lower approval rating among women than men, and he is struggling with religious conservatives. But it may be a particularly good fit for his base. His rise has been powered by angry lower-income white men with a high school diploma or less.
Cursing, Mercieca said, is a way of establishing an “in-group.” By using forbidden words, she said, the billionaire is telling his supporters, “I feel comfortable enough with you to be able to let my guard down.”
Trump’s primary strategic calculation might be even simpler: every violation of public norms earns him free media coverage. By being uncouth for a moment or two, Louden said, he can “suck all the oxygen out of the room,” depriving his rivals of the attention they need to catch him.
Harvard linguist Steven Pinker suggested to the Washington Post that Trump might have mistaken “schlonged” for an innocent Yiddish word. Others are doubtful. It probably doesn’t matter.
On a quiet news day just before the campaign slows for the holidays, there he was, dominating the headlines again.