It wasn’t a great political or cultural loss for Florida, but it’s kind of sad that Matt Gaetz quit competitive campaigning this year.
The brash young Republican brought a refreshing lack of sensitivity to public appearances, just when “woke” was starting to go out of style. If he hadn’t been so badly unsuited for attorney general, the cabinet post President Donald Trump briefly appointed him to, who knows what pithy new epigrams Gaetz might have contributed to American political lore?
A big gaffe came when Gaetz said it was odd that the most-vociferous advocates of abortion rights were so ugly no one would want to get them pregnant. When a Tampa reporter asked what he’d say to anyone offended by that remark, Gaetz responded with a two-word bit of public relations counsel.
“Be offended,” he said.
That’s really good advice. When the government or an officeholder does something that annoys you, OK, it happens. You’ll get over it. I’m offended, to some extent, by two or three things every day but never seem to be close enough to one of those fainting couches Victorian ladies would keep handy.
There is nothing in the Constitution assuring us a right to go through life perpetually un-offended. We just clutch our pearls and live with it. I’m not talking about horrible racist or sexist slurs, language or actions intended to be insulting or even threatening. But Gaetz was right about things that might shock you—but not everyone.
Trump is, by far, the all-time undisputed heavyweight champ of crudity. Just last month, he used a phrase commonly abbreviated “WTF” to say neither side of the Hamas-Israel war knows what it’s doing. And in 2016, a recording of Trump suggesting where he could grab women surfaced late in his campaign, to universal outrage.
Everyone was aghast but it didn’t hurt him much. The most deeply aggrieved people weren’t going to vote Republican anyway.
In addition to stifling diversity, equity and inclusion policies and affirmative-action college admissions, Trump’s administration demanded removal of a “Black Lives Matter” street mural in Washington, and state and federal officials have told cities to paint over rainbow crosswalks. The same goes for multi-colored lights illuminating big bridges during Pride Month.
The MAGA crowd is obviously offended by such public displays, but they’re not impeding traffic or hurting anybody. Local activists were equally offended by the dictates from above, which must have enhanced feelings of schadenfreude at the White House.
Putting a giant holding facility for undocumented immigrants in the Everglades may or may not have been a good idea. But naming it “Alligator Alcatraz” was plainly provocative.
The Trump administration also reversed the Biden-era renaming of military bases, restoring tributes to some heroes of the Confederacy, and removed gay-rights pioneer Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy vessel. In his first days back in the Oval Office, Trump restored the name of Mount McKinley. President Barack Obama had made it Mount Denali 10 years earlier as a bow to Alaska’s native peoples.
This is also an administration that declines to reply to correspondence from news reporters who note preferred pronouns, like “he/him” or “they/them,” on written inquiries. And let’s not forget the Gulf of America, a Trump rebranding that wound up in court when the Associated Press refused to play along with the president’s whim.
More recently, Trump admonished the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians to go back to their old names. “Redskins” was clearly offensive and “Indians” dates back to a time when moviemakers and headline writers just didn’t think about such things. Trump claims there was a “clamor” for returning the old names, but nobody else seems to have heard the outcry.
The Cleveland baseball team started calling itself the Indians in 1915, and Washington’s football club was the Boston Braves until it moved to the nation’s capital in 1932 and became the ‘Skins. Many newspapers and broadcast commentators used to avoid use of the names, fixing them in wire copy.
So it’s interesting that Trump said, in a social media post about the Commanders and Guardians, “Times are different now than they were three or four years ago.”
Hmmm, three or four years ago ... who was president then? And what was the “woke” political climate in that administration?
Bill Cotterell is a retired Capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at wrcott43@aol.com.
