President Trump says the Denmark Prime Minister’s statement on his proposal to buy Greenland was “nasty” and says all she had to do was tell him no. Says he cancelled his visit because “you don’t talk to the United States that way.” pic.twitter.com/v2opnIqDrw

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) August 21, 2019

A thought that disturbs me is that I suspect his poverty of language is not just ignorance, but a kind of magical thinking about labels.

Invoking nasty invalidates a woman and doesn’t even follow one dictionary definition of the word; it’s a cloud of negatives that are feminine, and once nastiness is invoked, you’re fair game. You haven’t been deferential. So you smell bad, and are on your period, and are bleeding out the face, are unattractive and fat and probably have Bad Sex of some variety.

This disturbs me because I think it is part of his appeal to his base—they deeply enjoy these Magic Words and the implication that the world’s full of targets who deserve cruelty, and implicitly that enjoying cruelty and sadism towards acceptable targets is noble—because Trump’s use of labels is only slightly more crude than other reactionary media figures.