Donald Trump made his pitch to voters by claiming that he was "politically incorrect." By that, he and most conservatives mean that they like to insult and demean people based on their gender, ethnicity or physical disability.
Like, say, Trump opening his presidential campaign by claiming Mexicans are rapists, constantly calling women fat pigs, his Megyn Kelly "blood coming out of her wherever" comment, or his mocking of reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint condition.
That isn't being political incorrect. That's just childish, rude and uncivil behavior.
But now that Trump is in office, he's constantly clamoring for real political correctness.
Take Colin Kaepernick and hundreds of football players who kneel during the national anthem. They are politically incorrect. Trump wants them fired for not toeing the party line, the very definition of political correctness.
Take those demonstrators protesting Brett Kavanaugh's nomination that Trump is constantly calling "a disgrace" (I assume Trump means the protesters, not the nomination -- but who knows?). They are politically incorrect.
Take the four or five books about the political situation in the White House that Trump claims are "fake news," and whose authors he is threatening to sue for libel. Those books are politically incorrect.
A libel suit is a completely idle threat, because A) Trump is a public figure, and B) if he actually went to court the defense would get to call witnesses, including Trump himself, and they would all have to testify under oath. Which Trump is incapable of doing because a) he is a pathological liar, and b) his senility-addled memory is so corroded that his only answers would be "I don't remember."
Take that editorial written by a White House senior staffer for the New York Times, which says that Trump has to constantly be handled behind his back to prevent the country from bumbling into nuclear catastrophe from his incompetence.
That's politically incorrect in the most literal sense: the entire White House staff is forced to directly work against the petty whims of a president who is intentionally trying to drive the country into chaos.
"Politically correct" came into common usage in the early 1900s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, who demanded political correctness from party members: comply or die.
Trump and his conservative enablers want to enforce that sort of real political correctness on America by trying to bully them into saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays," by harassing, threatening, attacking and trying to silence the press, constantly attacking gay and transgendered people, and by sacrificing women on the altar of anti-abortion politics by literally forcing them to bear children against their will. It's like Nazi Germany's eugenics program in reverse.
"Politically incorrect" gained wide currency when Bill Maher hosted a show by that name on Comedy Central in 1993. Maher, one of Trump's biggest critics, has since moved his gig to HBO and renamed it Real Time with Bill Maher.
If only Trump had misappropriated Maher's politics, not just his catch phrase . . . .
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