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It's like saying "DEMONcrats" or "RepubliKKKans". People who say such things, unironically, show they have such bad taste they cannot be taken seriously. People who say "Drumpf" or "Cheeto" or "Mango Mussolini" look ridiculous. This doesn't happen with names that do stick, to name a few: "The Iron Lady," "Slick Willie," "Dubya," "Governor Moonbeam," "Tricky Dick," "Old Hickory," "Honest Abe," "Landslide Lyndon," "Papa Doc," "BoJo," "The Gipper".
Consider the following comparison: "Moscow Mitch"; "Cocaine Mitch". Both of those names are in use, but only one has "stuck". The other makes the speaker sound like a hack. I need hardly say which.
Trump himself is pretty good at this. His epithets stick. It helps that he comes up with so many of them and most of them aren't very good. But consider: "Little Adam Schiff," "Sleepy Joe," "Little Marco," "Rocket Man," "Pocahontas," "Ron DeSanctimonious". "Lyin' Ted" was has never gone away. "Low Energy Jeb" was so powerful it effectively ended Jeb's political career. "Crooked Hillary," however cornball and unserious it is, worked.
I've often thought Trump could have ended the primary months ago and cornered the Zoomer vote by decisively calling DeSantis "No Rizz Ron".
In all serious DeSadness would've been way better than DeSanctimonious, that was one of his weakest yet.
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It doesn’t stick because they came directly from comedy TV. It’s not organic it’s something that they heard on TV and repeated. Drumpf came directly from Last Week Tonight and is the last name that the Trump family had from immigration to America from Germany. It’s not only uncreative but it’s astroturfed.
It's not really funny, the only insult in it is that it vaguely sounds a little like 'Dumb' (but not much).
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Because Trump is willing to repeat them ad nauseum as a supposedly serious candidate. He has zero shame. Democrats and Haley fail for the same reason: they're in the wrong genre.
They try for gravitas and authority - "when they go low"...- instead of just being funny and hammering the joke in. It's Head of State, not House of Cards.
I get your point. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine any Democrat pol would’ve been able to make “Drumpf” stick no matter how many times he repeated it.
"Drumpf" has the additional constraint that it's not as good as any of Trump's bangers in terms of playground insult succinctness and is pretty weird for the pro-migrant Democrats to try to make happen.
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