The political discourse on the Republican side of the 2016 presidential race started to go downhill even before Donald Trump announced he would run. There were already nasty barbs being thrown around by the other candidates like Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Trump, however, managed to bring things to a new low. He entered the race like a preschool bully. He immediately started directly insulting the other candidates. He shocked many journalists and disgusted some average citizens. Nothing seemed to be too lowbrow for Trump. He was relentless and shameless in his attacks.
Things have started to heat up lately in the race. Trump decided that insulting the other presidential candidates was not enough. He started going after revered Republican officials such as Senator John McCain from Arizona. Trump told a Conservative audience that McCain was not a hero because of his capture and time as a prisoner of war. He attacked Republican leadership. He attacked former President George W. Bush. He even went so far as to counter carefully crafted Republican narratives and blamed Bush for a litany of things. Trump was positively the bully in the room and no one seemed to want to challenge him until recently.
The field of Republican presidential hopefuls has finally declined to a manageable number. The candidates seeking to overtake Trump made a terrible tactical decision. Cruz and Senator Marco Rubio from Florida decided to try to hit back at Trump by stooping to his level. This basically means schoolyard insults and insinuations. The two senators took to the stages at campaign rallies and attempted to lob insults at Trump. Rubio got more attention for his efforts. The problem is that they were never going to be able to beat Trump at his own game.
One comment stood out. Marco Rubio mentioned that Trump has tiny hands. He implied that Trump’s hand size was indicative of the size of his genitals. This set off Trump who then took a moment at a recent Republican debate to stop and inform the audience that the charge was not true and his hands were not small. This was met with widespread condemnation in the media and public. The general thought was that presidential candidates should not be talking about genital or hand sizes on stage during a nationally televised debate. People in other countries were probably perplexed by the incident.
Ellen DeGeneres parodied the insults lobbed in the last few weeks. Her show put together a video of Trump talking during the debate and waving his hands around. The difference is that editors digitally replaced Trump’s actual hands with those of an infant. The video is hilarious because it takes some of the bluster out of the bizarre words Trump is speaking at the time. It is also is a nice jab at Trump who seems to think that everyone in the country loves and believes him despite polling data to the contrary.
A funny part of the entire exchange about small hands is that Trump claims he had no idea where it came from. He is lying and there is clear evidence to show it. Trump got into a feud with the editor of Spy magazine some time ago. The editor wrote a piece calling Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” because of his crass nature. Trump saw this and began sending the editor pictures of his hands from newspapers and magazines. The letters would always have something written on them like “not so small,” in gold marker. The letters continued for years. Trump has been battling the idea that he has tiny, underdeveloped baby hands for a long time. It is likely that Ellen’s video will be just the first of many since the public now knows what insult actually infuriates Trump.