The following article by Jelani Cobb was posted on the New Yorker website January 13, 2018:
The great and unheralded triumph of the Trump Administration is that it has created parity between its politics and its language. Since at least the time of Robert McNamara, the prevailing style of American politics has been to cloak atrocity in euphemism. Clinical language, the belief holds, will balm the troubled citizen’s conscience. That is not our current predicament. Quoting this President in his own words has resulted in the term “pussy” emerging from the side streets of impolite language to mainstream publications and cable-news shows. (Such is Trump’s affection for the word that a glossary of his statements would require two entries for it: “Cruz, Ted is,” and “grab them by the.”) Trump shouted to all who would listen, including an audience at a community college in Iowa, that he would “bomb the shit” out of isis. He referred to N.F.L. players as “sons of bitches.” He has uttered profanities more publicly and more prolifically than any of his predecessors. Antonin Scalia derided our “coarsened” society, but rappers are not the ones who caused CNN to have to repeatedly air the vaginal slur on air. The current Commander-in-Chief did that. Continue reading “Tracing the Racist Roots of Donald Trump’s Obscenities”