Donald Trump in a news conference in Bismarck, N.D.Americans shouldn't let Donald Trump corner the market on branding and labeling.
He has, after all, shown us how to use this powerful labeling tool with his own very effective method of denigrating those to whom he clearly feels inferior: Low-energy Jeb, Lying Ted, Little Marco, and so on.
Of course, he has made a stab at branding himself as well. He's claimed to be the anti-establishment, straight-talking, not politically correct, polls-leading (no matter what the polls said) billionaire businessman who's going to "Make America Great Again."
Based on his nonstop slurs, that slogan is simply code for Make America White Again.
But when his opponents and media pundits point out that his policies are squishy at best, but mostly nonexistent, the words slide right off of Teflon Don.
Do you recall his reply to naysayers questioning how his demeanor - a man who called women pigs and Latinos drug mules - could ever possibly appear "presidential" to the country and the world?
At a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., in April, he declared that, oh yes, he could be presidential.
"Now, my wife is constantly saying, 'Darling, be more presidential.' I just don't know that I want to do it quite yet," the reality TV star told cheering groupies. "At some point I'm going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored. And I'll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people, I'll have about 150 people, and they'll say, 'But, boy, he really looks presidential!' "
Later to reporters questioning when that "some point" would be, Trump replied that it would be when he got the nomination.
Well, he has the nomination sewn up, and we're still waiting.
We're still waiting for him to flip on the presidential switch and show carriage, posture and intelligence. We're still waiting for him to show a dignified comportment and a degree of knowledge - to exhibit the seriousness one must project in order to be taken seriously as a leader.
As Wesley Morris, a critic at large for The New York Times recently noted: "'Presidential' used to be something to aspire to. All of that authority, know-how, gravitas, good posture and moral rectitude - it seemed so important, so adult, so American."
But we're still waiting for Trump to change the channel of his internal TV monitor to show us his presidentialness.
What we're seeing instead is a record, skipping continually on the hot buttons he can't give up - the hot buttons that show him to be a demagoguing, sexist, bigoted bully. He can't help himself. He can't be presidential, because he's not. And he never will be. It's just not in his DNA.
Yet while Trump has often been called a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a xenophobe, a con man and a liar, he still hasn't been named in the branding sense. So let's throw some branding spaghetti at Trump's wall and see what sticks.
Jon Stewart recently tried "man-baby" Trump. But that might have a bit of a "cool" factor.
Miraculously, no one has yet dubbed him Lying Donald, or Pig Donald, or Bankrupt Donald.
But perhaps those names, too, are overly mild for the star of what one evangelical preacher on "Face the Nation" recently said seemed to crawl out of the "reality television moral sewage." Now that was good, but alas, too long to have instant and lasting connection.
The tabloid New York Daily News in February ran Trump's picture with a the words "Anti Christ" in giant letters.
That gives him too much credit.
Maybe Darth Donald? Maybe Darth J. Drumpf?
No, actually some things are better kept simple.
Loser.
"Loser Trump."