Teetering
Trump just did an Oval Office sit down with the president of Finland, which he used to have a terrifying public freakout.
Go to 45 minutes to watch him do it.
Is it true that “he couldn’t carry his jockstrap” is a saying? Trump says it is, and that it applies to Adam Schiff with respect to Mike Pompeo.
Niinistö looks like a hostage. How do you say “blink three times if you need help” in Finnish?
That poor man, it must have been excruciating.
Five minutes in it looked as if they were going to be able to talk about Finland, but no.
I’ve watched 12.49 minutes so far and it’s terrifying. It might as well be a rabid dog in that chair.
Yes, it is a saying. Sport lingo.
The president of Finland didn’t get to say a word. Not one fucking word.
Ah, so sport lingo as in it’s a putdown of a rival or rivals? Is it used outside sports much?
In sports, it’s usually used to suggest inferiority in an exaggerated way. If I say “Player A couldn’t carry Player B’s jockstrap,” I might be saying that Player A really sucks, or that Player B is/was really incredible, or both. Usually it’s a response to someone else suggesting that A is comparable to or better than B: for example, I might say “Mike Trout is the greatest center fielder since Willie Mays,” to which some Mays fanatic might claim “Trout isn’t fit to carry Mays’s jockstrap.”
Which is what made Trump’s usage of it a little weird — nobody was discussing “who was a better Congressman, Schiff or Pompeo.”
I’ve heard it used outside sports on occasion, though I don’t recall it in politics before.
The cringe when Trumpski pats his knee…
I wonder what would have happened if the Finnish president had stood up and walked away.
No more Mark 41s for Finland.
Still trying to figure out how the adjective ‘perfect’ makes sense to describe a conversation.
Resident Trump doesn’t actually know what a jock strap is. Adrenaline finally woke up some tiny bit of residual grey matter to warn him that this is yet another one of those words that he actually doesn’t know, hence the “blank”.
It’s not as if he’s ever self-propelled his considerable physical mass into situations where he would need a “blank strap”. He probably suspects they are intimately connected with bone spurs . . .
and please, please, someone tell him that some “blank” straps are used to hold “cups” in place
How can he say it’s made up and wrong, when it corresponds EXACTLY with what DJT says happened during the phone call? What about the whistleblower says is different from the WH provided summary? Nothing, that’s what. They both say the SAME THING.
The other thing I was just thinking about, for some reason, was how clever he seems to think he is when he announces a nickname. ‘I call him Shifty Schiff, hehe geddit?’ He seems so smug and proud of himself for having thought of that himself.
guest @15,
Well, for a while at least, the media was enabling him in that belief. There was all sorts of talk, not just from right-wing media, about how “devastating” Trump’s nicknames were, and hand-wringing in some quarters of the left about which candidate can survive that terrifying gauntlet. “Oh no, we can’t nominate Warren — he’ll call her Pocahontos and then she’ll lose!”
And frankly, that was probably the most “clever,” i.e. least stupid, of his nicknames. “Lying Ted” Cruz? I mean, sure, Cruz told lies like all the GOP candidates, but it wasn’t a distinguishing feature. “Li’l Marco” Rubio? Weak. “Crazy” Joe Biden? Biden’s decidedly NOT crazy, he’s fairly dull other than his penchant for malapropisms. (He’s actually so uncreative that he’s begun recycling them — wasn’t Bernie Sanders “Crazy Bernie”? And “Liddle” Adam Schiff seemed to be just a botched version of “Li’l Marco”)
I have a hard time believing that any of those things moved the needle at all. They caught on with his supporters because people like insulting names for a political opponent. Remember the 10,000 different nicknames the left blogosphere used to have for George W. Bush? Shrub, Chimpy BushHitler, and all that? Didn’t seem to do much good electorally.
The only novelty Trump brought was that for the first time, it was a candidate using disrespectful nicknames for his opponents. Which perhaps accounts for some of the enthusiasm of his supporters — they like his professional wrestling routine — but doesn’t really move public opinion.
Yes, Bush 43 was also known for nicknames, but they were mostly for his close associates, allies, and friends. They were “lovingly” bestowed (yeah, lovingly calling someone Turd Blossom? Strange, but yeah, I believe he meant it fondly). Bush didn’t go out of his way to call Al Gore names, or to call John Kerry names, though many of his supporters did. He bestowed nicknames on people he liked and associated with. That’s (sort of) normal; lots of people do it, and it wasn’t meant as a put down.
A presidential candidate assigning nasty nicknames to his opponents is a new level of low. Though a lot of us have adopted that Nasty Woman epithet and wear it proudly (literally; I have at least 2 t-shirts identifying me as a nasty woman, and my husband has one identifying himself as a bad hombre married to a nasty woman).