WASHINGTON— In 2011, eyebrows shot up when former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin used a salty acronym — WTF — to mock the policies of President Barack Obama.
How quaint.
Five years later, Donald Trump has blown right past acronyms. He’s in a profanity-laced campaign for the Republican nomination that has seen multiple candidates hurl insults and disparaging remarks at one another and their critics.
In recent days, Trump has publicly lip-synced the F-bomb, blurted out the S-word more than once, hurled an offensive term for coward at rival Ted Cruz and fired a steady string of put-downs at other candidates whom he labels pathetic, liars, losers, nasty, evil and more.
While Trump started it, other GOP candidates have jumped right into the rhetorical mosh pit, readily trading versions of “liar, liar” in Saturday night’s venomous debate.
Cruz has said Trump is “losing it,” called out his “Trumpertantrums” and dismissed the billionaire’s insults as “hysterical.”
Before exiting the race, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie predicted that he could beat Hillary Clinton in a debate, promising, “I'll beat her rear end on that stage,” and tormented fellow Republican Marco Rubio as a fragile “boy in the bubble.”
Even Jeb Bush, whose 90-year-old mother recently complained that he was too polite, belatedly joined in.
A super PAC supporting Bush is hoping Trump’s language is a turnoff to South Carolina voters. It’s running a radio ad in the state that strings together clips of Trump’s expletive-deleted language and then asks, “Is this the type of man we want our children exposed to? The time is now for South Carolina to end the Trump charade.”
Trump frames his blunt language as a harmless rejoinder to political correctness run amok, telling one TV interviewer, “Every once in a while you can have a little fun, don’t you think?”
But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on political communication, said Trump has “hijacked” political correctness to justify his routine use of personal attacks. That’s causing other candidates to mirror his tactics and creates a worrisome diversion from a needed discussion of ideas, she said.
Harking back to 1988, she recalled when Republican presidential contender Bob Dole stepped over a line when he snapped at GOP primary rival George Bush to “stop lying about my record.”
Until then, she said, “candidates did not use the word ‘lie’ about each other.”
It’s all part of a broader trend toward informality in politics that has been going on for more than a century, says Greene.
Many Americans are drawn to Trump, Greene says, because he talks like “the guy next to them on the bar stool.”
“Some people find the guy next to you on the barstool obnoxious, but a lot of Americans ARE that guy.”
