Yellin’
Felon’s logorrheic lamentations: "I never said Milwaukee is 'horrible,'
but if I had it would be because of its crime and elections..."
By AJP for Community Contributors Team
Community
Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a week after Donald Trump called Milwaukee, Wisconsin—the site of July’s Republican National Convention—a “horrible city,” one local brewery is showing its civic pride while taking full financial advantage of the Yellin’ Felon’s logorrheic lamentations.
Trump may have created less than zero jobs over the course of his presidential tenure, but he is providing a boost to the fortunes of MobCraft Beer, which has debuted (Not So) Horrible City IPA in direct response to Trump’s witless diss.
"We were just putzing around this morning, talking through our production schedule and kind of heard the news of our city being called horrible and didn't really like that. Milwaukee is so cool," MobCraft owner Henry Schwartz told Milwaukee’s WISN-TV.
But while some insults are easier to leverage than others—“Marxist, Fascist, Radical Left Thugs Living Like Vermin” barely even fits on a onesie, for instance—MobCraft’s new brew is part of a long tradition of reclaiming put-downs and using them to rally, and raise up, one’s own people, whether through the power of civic pride or tribal identity.
In fact, the Biden campaign well recognizes this and has already started selling “(NOT) a Horrible City” stickers and T-shirts at its official swag store. It’s reminiscent of the left’s reclaiming of MAGA’s secretly vulgar “Let’s Go Brandon” chant through the sly and sticky Dark Brandon meme, which the Biden campaign has fully embraced and currently uses in fundraising.
These sorts of injuries to tribal and civic pride can be really powerful, of course. In fact, while many pundits (and Hillary Clinton’s campaign itself) pointed to the infamous 11th hour James Comey letter as the key turning point in the 2016 election, her description of half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” may have been even more determinative, as those very deplorables almost instantly started using it as an ironic rallying cry—making the comment virtually impossible to forget.
In a November 2016 election post-mortem, entrepreneur Diane Hessan, who’d been on a special assignment for the Clinton campaign, noted that it was the “deplorables” comment more than anything else that turned undecided voters against Hillary. Hessan described how the comment had alienated voters like George, a 58-year-old undecided Democrat from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”All hell broke loose.
George told me that his neighborhood was outraged, that many of his hard-working, church-going, family-loving friends resented being called that name. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.
So could Hillary’s “deplorables” comment—despite its undeniable accuracy—have cost her the election? Ultimately, that’s unknowable. But it sure didn’t help.
Meanwhile, it’s entirely possible that Trump lost Arizona, a traditionally red redoubt, because he couldn’t stop insulting Grand Canyon State favorite son John McCain. That’s not the same as insulting an entire state, city, or voting bloc, but it does veer dangerously close to attacking a state’s shared identity by smearing one of its widely acclaimed heroes. (Imagine if, instead of saying Milwaukee was “horrible,” Trump had claimed the Miller Park sausage racers were juicing. Or that Robin Yount throws like a Trump.)
A Nov. 8, 2016, Politico story sought to trace Trump’s Arizona face-plant back to his yearslong McCain feud, which somehow continued well after the senator had died of brain cancer.
As of Saturday, it appeared that about 100,000 voters in Arizona’s Maricopa County alone, which makes up about half the state’s population, voted for Biden and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kelly but chose all Republicans for a host of other state offices, said Garrett Archer, the former chief data analyst for the Arizona secretary of state.“Generic Republicans down-ballot are winning,” he said, including in the state Legislature, which was widely predicted to flip into Democratic hands for the first time in more than 50 years but will keep its GOP majority. That suggests many reliably Republican voters had a special animus toward Trump and Sen. Martha McSally, who was banking on her reflexive loyalty to Trump to carry her over the threshold.
In other words, some insults hit closer to home than others, and in an era defined by tribal politics, poking entire tribes in the eyes is never a good, erm, look.
Of course, ever since Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 with the help of Russia, Comey, and our idiosyncratic 237-year-old Electoral College, many have been tempted to overestimate his political savvy.
Though he’s fallen on his face over and over since then—losing the White House and Congress in 2020 and leading his party to a mealy midterm performance in 2022—many pundits remain enamored of the Teflon Don. But is Trump’s pugilistic campaign style a considered strategy or just a way to keep his head from exploding with rage—similar to when a surgeon installs a stent to drain dangerous excess fluid from a patient’s brain?
More likely, it’s the latter. While insulting Gold Star families, military service members in general, and numerous U.S. cities in both blue and red states somehow failed to derail him politically in the past, it can't have improved his electoral prospects. And it’s hardly a stretch to think Trump’s “horrible” gaffe could cost him the 2024 election. After all, Wisconsin is among the swingiest of swing states, having gone to Trump by a 22,000-vote margin in 2016 and to Biden by a mere 20,000 votes in 2020.
Why else do you think the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee—which is posting billboards featuring Trump’s quote all across Milwaukee—are leaning so heavily into this? And why else would Trump, who has the impulse control of a tweaking rhesus monkey, be backpedaling so furiously?
Oh, wait, you didn’t hear that part? Yes, because Trump is Trump, he’s denying he said the thing that he said to House Republicans during a recent campaign strategy meeting.
In a post Saturday on Truth Social, the 45th president posted: “The Democrats are making up stories that I said Milwaukee is a ‘horrible city.’ This is false, a complete lie.”
But that came after an interview with Fox in which Trump didn't deny the remark and said he was commenting on crime and elections in Milwaukee.
[...]
Republican congressmen in the room confirmed the comment to the Journal Sentinel with different takes on what Trump was talking about, but Trump in his social media post blamed Democrats, none of whom were in the room.
Well, if Republicans can blame President Biden for rising crime rates that are actually falling, why should it be so hard to blame Democrats for repeating things they heard in a room they never stepped foot in? After all, they just need to convince human manure spreader Sean Hannity that it happened—because he’ll repeat anything that lets him jump in front of Lindsey Graham for the chance to loofah Trump’s bone spurs.
Of course, Trump’s clear animus toward Milwaukee—and Baltimore, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., et al.—is part and parcel of his ingrained racism. And his dog-whistling may actually help him in northern Wisconsin towns with more giant fish statues than racial minorities.
But Milwaukee—a town of more than half a million souls—is unlikely to forget this diss anytime soon, and Trump may ultimately discover that his mouth was his own worst enemy.
While some may see Trump’s insults as part of his secret sauce, there’s a reason most politicians don’t follow suit. These kinds of gaffes can be political suicide—and you can rest assured this unforced error will be part of the news cycle again when Republicans meet in Brew City for their convention in July.
That said, we shouldn’t wait. As Democrats, we need to turn these crass comments into rallying cries of our own. Because the one thing that would truly be horrible is Donald Trump returning to the White House.
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