The leaking of top-level military secrets was bad enough, but I\u2019m obsessed with Maga\u2019s fratboy lexicon<\/p>\n
The Maga-fication of American political discourse, which <\/strong>started, arguably, with Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter<\/a> in 2015, peaked this week with news of Pete Hegseth referring to European countries in the leaked Signal chat as \u201cPATHETIC<\/a>\u201d, and enjoyed a detour last Tuesday when Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and former running mate of Kamala Harris, appeared at a town hall in Wisconsin and called Elon Musk \u201ca dipshit<\/a>\u201d. (This is not the first time he has referred to Musk this way. Right before the election last year, Walz told a crowd<\/a>: \u201cLook, Elon\u2019s on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit.\u201d)<\/p>\n Parking for a moment the perfection of the phrase \u201cskipping like a dipshit\u201d to capture Musk\u2019s very particular style of movement and speech, the range of what can and can\u2019t be said in politics has clearly, radically changed. When you look back on the phrase that caused Hillary Clinton so much trouble in 2016 \u2013 \u201cbasket of deplorables<\/a>\u201d \u2013 it sounds like a quote from an 18th-century novel. \u201cTake that, sir! You and your basket of deplorables!\u201d Now we have Trump referring to Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor mistakenly added to the Signal chat, as a \u201csleazebag<\/a>\u201d, and Hegseth, the US defense secretary, telling JD Vance that he fully shares the vice-president\u2019s \u201cloathing of European free-loading<\/a>\u201d. We are millimetres away from someone shouting \u201casshole\u201d across the floor of the Senate.<\/p>\n Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The leaking of top-level military secrets was bad enough, but I\u2019m obsessed with Maga\u2019s fratboy lexicon The Maga-fication of American political discourse, which started, arguably, with Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter in 2015, peaked this week with news of Pete Hegseth referring to European countries in the leaked Signal chat as \u201cPATHETIC\u201d, and enjoyed … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}