I know what you think I’m going to say: Donald Trump deserves a kind word because he appears to have genuine affection for his children, or at least for some of them.
But come on. No. He gets no credit for that. It merely allows us to say with some degree of confidence that he is in fact a human being. Have we really lowered the bar on Trump that far?
Maybe you think I’m going to say something about how his shockingly racist campaign, by outing a major segment of the GOP base, has forced about a political realignment that was overdue. Nah.
Trump’s true contribution to American culture is, of course, his three-letters-and-an-exclamation-point linguistic innovation: Sad!
Rarely has so much toxicity and bad faith been so effectively packed into such little space (and typed out by such little fingers). While it comes with its own punctuation mark (!) the word itself serves as a punctuation to whatever thought is being offered up.
A well-placed Sad! can instantly transform a bland and mean-spirited put-down into something richer. It allows Trump to feign sorrow at whatever misfortune he is describing, to pretend he wishes nothing but the best for his target but, in a sad turn of events, things haven’t worked out for them.
But of course Trump delights in the failure of anything and anyone that is not him, which is subtly hinted at with the exclamation point. It is his unspoken admission of schadenfreude, which never needed admitting in the first place, given how patently he wears his emotions on his sleeve.
Others have begun to adopt it for themselves, first ironically and mockingly, and then quite naturally. Even “crooked Hillary” has begun to deploy the Sad!ness.
Clinton can’t be expected to execute the move as skillfully as Trump does, and in that case she didn’t, but she got the basic point.
Clinton’s attack dog, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has embraced Trump’s form and turned it around on him, occasionally substituting “Weak!” or “Lame!” for Trump’s “Sad!”
To understand the full extent of Trump’s influence, consider that the author of the tweet you just read is a former Harvard law professor and a United States senator. The one before was a senator, a secretary of state, and is likely to be our next president. Sad!
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
