Say what you will about Donald Trump’s declining facility with language, but the guy’s vocabulary is remarkably consistent! Consider that he publicly described 35 separate things as beautifulin the span of one month in 2017, including the Cuban people, farming, and airports.
It’s easy to see, then, why the prospect of losing access to this versatile descriptor would send the president into a fake panic. In an address to a gathering of young black conservatives on Friday, Trump praised the crowd’s “beautiful and handsome faces,” then lamented that “you can’t say those things anymore” because it’s not “politically correct.”
“We have to bring that back into the world of being OK,” he said.
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This is clearly a jab at feminist movements in general and the #MeToo movement in particular—an oblique attempt to characterize a massive reckoning with sexual harassment as a hysterical crusade against well-meaning compliments. It’s similar to the claims Trump and other conservatives make about the (never not extremely popular!) phrase “merry Christmas,” which the president claims people have started saying again after Barack Obama forcibly removed the phrase from Americans’ vocabularies. By reframing calls for religious inclusivity as anti-Christian attacks, Trump tries to paint progressives and religious minorities as malicious and unreasonable opponents of free speech.
The strange thing about Trump’s unnecessary defense of beautiful in the face of fanatical feminists is that the president himself rarely uses the word to describe an attractive woman. Sure, he’s called several wives of heads of state beautiful, as well as women he’s slept with, and he once called the Queen of England beautifulsix times in response to a single question. But Trump has said his own fingers are beautiful. Other beautifulitems, per Trump: his presidential campaign, a lot of dead people, the signs protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, Kavanaugh’s family, Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony, clean water, “clean coal,” the “myth” of clean energy, farming, sleeping gas, military equipment, and his own “totally controlled” temperament. None of these things are going to be offended by Donald Trump calling them beautiful.
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It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that beautiful, which took on a menacing cast when he used it in the Access Hollywoodrecording—“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful, I just start kissing them”—has become completely desexualized over the course of Trump’s presidency. Rather than blaming politically correct leftists for changing the traditional definition of beauty, Trump should hold himself responsible for saying a whole lot of incredibly weird stuff.
That still leaves handsome, however. For Trump, handsome, unlike beautiful, remains connected to sexual desirability. He has called Kavanaugh and former White House physician Ronny Jackson handsomeseveral times, and in June, at his Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un, he asked photographers to make sure the two leaders looked “nice and handsome and thin.” Kim responded by glancing around the room in what looked like discomfort and disbelief. Perhaps that encounter was on Trump’s mind on Friday when he wished for more talk of people’s good looks. He wasn’t pining for more opportunities to sexually harass people. He was, in his peculiar and idiotic way, conducting diplomacy.
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