Trump keeps talking about ‘sarcasm,’ but struggles with its meaning

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:

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 obviously lying.

But it was a familiar lie. When Trump argued publicly that Barack Obama was “the founder of ISIS,” he later defended the rhetoric by saying it was “sarcasm.” He referred to Jimmy Carter as the “late, great Jimmy Carter,” adding soon after that he was “just being sarcastic.”

The Republican also said he wanted White House officials to treat him the way North Korean officials treat Kim Jong Un. When reporters pressed for some kind of explanation for what he meant, Trump said, “You don’t understand sarcasm.” (The video of his original comments makes clear he wasn’t being sarcastic.)

In 2019, Trump reflected on his 2016 call for Russia to intervene in the elections on his behalf, telling a CPAC audience that it was another example of him being “sarcastic.”

A year later, Trump confused Nobel Prizes with the Pulitzer Prize, only to defend the comments by claiming — you guessed it — that it was an example of “sarcasm.”

The Republican keeps using the word “sarcastic,” but I don’t think it means what he thinks it means.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.