Ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump spoke a campaign rally and made an embarrassing mistake — twice.
“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it,” the former president said, mixing up his former ambassador to the U.N. and House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. “All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down.”
There was no great mystery to the slip-up. Haley, his rival for the GOP’s 2024 nomination, was obviously on his mind just days ahead of a closely watched primary, so he accidentally referenced her name when he meant to peddle false claims about Pelosi.
The story about the mistake generated some chatter before the political world moved on. At his latest campaign rally, however, Trump wanted to talk about it again. The Hill reported overnight:
Former President Trump said he purposely conflated Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) with GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley during a speech last month. “So it’s very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose. I’m not a Nikki fan, and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names, they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from tricky Nikki,” Trump said Wednesday during a rally in North Charleston, S.C.
His audience apparently found this persuasive. They shouldn’t have.
For now, let’s put aside the obvious fact that he made a simple mistake in New Hampshire, and for him to suggest a month later that this was a misunderstood example of “sarcastic” humor is ridiculous.
Instead, let’s focus on an increasingly strange rhetorical pattern.
In 2020, for example, after the then-president suggested injecting Covid patients with disinfectant, Trump responded to public ridicule by saying the comments were intended to be “sarcastic.” He was
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