I really hate having to write about CNN’s resident idiot, Chris Cilizza—aka “the rankest assbrain in the Western Hemisphere,” “the punchline to the cruelest work of absurdist comedy in the history of the fucking universe, and that the title of that work is On the Origin of Species,” “an amoral rat whose professional existence… is predicated entirely on cynical indifference to truth or fact or consequence”—but here we are. I apologize in advance.
If you’ve read any of Cillizza’s columns, you know that he spent the vast majority of the 2016 campaign celebrating the wit of Donald Trump and generally sucking up to power. Now that Trump’s hog waller of a “presidency” is over, Chris has been trying desperately to scrape off the mud that he was gleefully rolling around in. Today, he’s calling his former muse “deeply childish,” and ticking off a list of Trump’s offenses.
Remember the letter he sent to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last spring in response to the New York Democrat’s push for more federal involvement in the coronavirus response? As I wrote at the time, the letter “reads like a sort of Mad Libs you might fill out and leave in the locker of your 7th grade enemy.”
Or that time when Trump walked out of a “60 Minutes” interview because he didn’t like being asked so many questions about his response to the Covid-19 pandemic? (The interview was in October 2020 — as the country approached the peak of the pandemic.)
Or all of the nicknames Trump likes to bestow on his political opponents? (Is there anything more fundamentally un-adult then using nicknames to deride people?) Or the hundreds (thousands?) of tweets put out by Trump both before and during his presidency in which he attacked the looks or intelligence of someone he didn’t like?
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Did he just really write that? Because this is where you’d normally hear a record scratch sound effect—whatever the merits of the accusation, THAT FUCKIN’ GUY does NOT get to throw mud at Trump over offensive nicknames. And that’s because Chris CELEBRATED those nicknames. In fact, he called Trump “the Michael Jordan of name-calling,” like it was a good thing, and made a list of his favorites. Chris even put up a Tweet to make sure everyone saw how clever he was. I took a screenshot, for posterity.
Chris Cillizza celebrating candidate Donald Trump’s name-calling/Facebook screen shot
We are living in a golden age of political nicknames.
President Donald Trump is the Michael Jordan of name-calling, seemingly upping the ante of what’s possible in the nickname sphere with each passing week.
On Tuesday morning, Trump added another – “Cheatin’ Obama”– in reference to his immediate predecessor in the White House. It’s not clear what exactly where Obama was “cheatin’,” but it doesn’t matter! It’s a nickname! It doesn’t have to make sense!
Where does the latest nickname fit in my definitive rankings of Trump’s nicknames for his political enemies? Good question! Scroll down.
Some of Cillizza’s favorites:
11. “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer”: Every time I hear this one about the Senate Minority Leader, I do laugh. At the same time, Trump has known Schumer for decades – they are both New Yorkers – so the bar for greatness is a little higher.
9. “1 for 38 Kasich”: This moniker for the governor of Ohio is deeply, deeply underappreciated. A dig on Kasich’s lack of wins during the Republican primary season that takes waaaaay longer to say than “John Kasich”? I’m all in.
2. “Lyin’ Ted“: I can’t tell if this nickname is really that good or I am simply biased toward it because I heard it so many times during the 2016 Republican primary campaign.
Back in 2018, Chris was “all in” on the name-calling. They made him laugh, by his own admission. He liked some more than others, especially “Lyin’ Ted.”
But now that Trump is out of power, all of a sudden Chris finds the former president’s “defining trait” to be be “childish,” as if he wasn’t laughing right along with him, all throughout Cheetolini’s reign of error. I’d almost compare his effort to whitewash his own history to that of Jennifer Rubin— except Rubin has utterly parted ways with conservatism and is seemingly trying to turn over a new leaf.
But not you, Chris Cillizza. That brown lipstick is NEVER washing off. NEVER. You’re a suck-up to power, you’ll always BE a suck-up to power, and you will never be anything MORE than a suck-up to power. Like the good folks at Deadspin wrote, America would be better off if you were “fired out of a large cannon into an even larger cliff face.”
Preferably wearing a clown suit.
