The lesson here is that no one else gets the license that voters give Trump to be his worst self.
All the self-confidence with which Jon Ossoff delivered a pointed barb at Donald Trump — or, more accurately, his relatively unknown aide Natalie Harp — disappeared when he was asked to explain himself.
The senator “raised this question out there,” said MS Now host Jen Psaki, of Ossoff’s leading comments about the president and his young female aide. After all, the implication in it wasn’t particularly subtle.
“He doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff recently said to a packed house of lively supporters. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The audience roared. They all understood the insinuation: a notorious lecher and his star-struck courtier in tight confines (while frustrating Trump’s would-be Iranian assassins). What else is one to think? The senator’s remark went viral.
But when Psaki asked Ossoff to expand on his remarks, the puckish grin disappeared. A drawn face took its place as the Georgia senator searched for a more legitimate rationale for his comments.
“I’ve heard this particular aide referred to as his security blanket,” Ossoff explained. Indeed, he could have said the same thing about “any number of senior aides,” perhaps even a man. “They’re not telling him what he needs to hear,” Ossoff continued. “They’re telling him what he wants to hear.”
Ossoff’s diminished confidence is both telling and heartening. It’s more evidence, as if we needed any, that Donald Trump’s act is his alone. After all, recent American political history is littered with the carcasses of the campaigns that tried and failed to pull off the president’s shtick.
“The strategy is not to have someone who needs to read a 40-page deck and calibrate before posting,” the onetime head of the Democratic National Committee’s “War Room,” Tim Hogan, told the Washington Post’s reporters in the summer of 2025, “but just go out and recruit people who know how to dunk.” In other words, what the party needs more than anything else are candidates who can taunt with the best of them.
This was the Democratic Party’s institutional response to what could only be the latest of several identity crises that Trump’s political success has imposed on his opponents. The Democrats resolved after Trump’s 2024 victory to swear more, “use edgier insults,” and generally humiliate themselves in their effort to “project a raw authenticity” the president himself exudes. This imperative yielded a patently inauthentic cascade of overcoached and downright gratuitous juvenility.
Think of the Democrats who tried their hand at Trump’s insult comic act. Kamala Harris’s right-hand man, Tim Walz, drew praise from the press for popularizing a lurid and wholly fabricated allegation against JD Vance involving inappropriate acts with a piece of furniture. It seems voters weren’t nearly as impressed. Likewise, beyond the shut-ins who populate social media websites with content, no one gave Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett any plaudits for calling the wheelchair-bound Texas Governor Greg Abbott “governor Hot Wheels.” When House Minority Leader tried to appropriate Trump’s mean nickname gimmick by calling Trump himself “Captain Chaos,” the public’s reaction was universally one of teeth-shattering embarrassment.
The lesson here is that no one else gets the license that voters give Trump to be his worst self. That goes for Republicans, too, as Marco Rubio learned as far back as 2016. You’d need a constitution of tempered steel to read Trump aide Steven Cheung’s denunciation of “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Jon “Jackoff,” without wanting to crawl out of your own skin. Many of the Republicans who aped Trump’s penchant for derogatory remarks about their critics have since been shunted off into political exile. In this regard, Trump himself may be an outlier.
At least, when it comes to Trump’s rhetorical crutches, we can hope the public has less tolerance for them when they come from anyone other than the president himself. We’ll know for certain soon enough. But so far, the evidence is encouraging.