Ambiguous Dog Whistle?
By If the Republican Convention had blown up with e-mails, resignation of boss and the beat down of a big player. (Bernie), media would go wild
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2016
Today proves what I have always known, that @Reince Priebus is the tough one and the smart one, not Debbie Wasserman Shultz (@DWStweets.)
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2016
A friend pointed out that in two tweets, Trump managed to get a Jewish politician’s name or twitter handle into parentheses. Only one set of parentheses, not three, as is the style of white supremacists, but that would be too obvious. I am genuinely on the fence as to whether this one is a clumsy use of punctuation or a dog whistle. Obviously, Trump says a lot of things that more obviously sit somewhere on the spectrum from “dog whistle” to “shrieking noise the pod people make in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to identify remaining humans,” so Trump’s status as a white supremacist doesn’t exactly hang on this verdict. I’m just curious what commenters here think. He later called Debbie Wasserman-Schultz “highly neurotic.”